When writers ask for software suggestions, one of the most frequent recommendations I see—other than the evil whose name must not be uttered—is Scrivener. The idea is that you can write in any order you like and keep project notes with the rest of your work. Of course, Scrivener is proprietary software and probably keeps your data in some sort of proprietary format (I’m not sure about this) so it should make any wary writer nervous. All your data is local and old versions continue to work so it’s not as bad as a lot of other commercial software.
Still, if you’re paranoid or just like supporting open source and having your text data in text, you’ll probably prefer Emacs, Vim, or some other text editor. There are a lot of such solutions including, of course, Org mode. On the other hand, people who have used Scrivener really like the way it organizes their writing projects and even if they move on they say they miss that aspect of it.
If you’re one of those people, help is at hand. William Rankin has announced that he’s just released version 0.4.1 of Binder and that it’s available in MELPA and MELPA-stable. Binder is an Emacs minor mode for handling multi-file writing projects. Rankin says that it’s heavily influenced by Scrivener and therefore may be just the thing for folks wanting to write in, say, Markdown or Org while still enjoying a Scrivener-like experience.
I haven’t tried it yet—although I intend to—and it’s still fairly early in the development cycle but it seems like a great addition to the Emacs arsenal for writers. If you’re involved with (largish) writing projects, you might want to give it a try.