Scrivener

I hope that this is acceptable. But for the longest time, whenever I would write my fiction, I'd use Microsoft Word. It does a pretty decent job, and has a lot of advanced features that authors need for formatting blocks of text. However, since Office 365 came out, there's a monthly subscription fee attached. When you're poor like me, that's unacceptable. Just the fact that Microsoft can turn off your advanced features, or the fact that you need the Internet to write is ... bogus. The Internet is full of distractions. When I'm writing, I want to unplug and just write!

So, when I discovered Scrivener at $59 for a single-time purchase, I was overjoyed. What's really cool is that this is a software specifically designed for authors. You basically write your book on what I call Note cards, each one being a separate Scene. You can rearrange these note cards in any order. It creates an Outline for you, keeps track of words, you can keep track of all your research too, all organized within a TreeView.

There's a Windows and a Mac version. I don't remember if there's a Linux version or not.

There's also a companion app, Scrapple, which is a Mind Map application, for like $20.

That sounds nice especially if you're a writer! I just use Openoffice whenever I need to use office tools, but even Open Office Writer most likely doesn't have the tools you get in Scrivener since it's more author focused.