October Novel Prep Challenge

Oracle - Holy shades of day job! I do software licensing analysis based on how Oracle or IBM would view deployments (common sense has little to do with it), rather than administering DBs.

Depending on the complexity of your NaNo project, you may want to assemble data in a way that's easy to access in November. Maybe printed pages in a three ring binder or manila folders, maybe an assembly of things you've thrown in Evernote or OneNote, my mash-up of Word and Excel docs stored locally on your hard drive or in the cloud, or the exciting wall of colorful post-it notes.

Some examples would be -

         character sheets, in case you mention their height, weight, eyes, hair early in the novel and then want to be consistent
         list of secondary and minor characters, for answering what was that guy's name?
         timeline, multiple types could be used, like if it's a long-spanning novel, births, deaths, school graduations, marriage ...
         chapter and scene list, maybe also include POV, goal of scene, who's there, and/or just a description of what will happen in the chapter (this could also be your outline)
         setting list, in case you want to reference info about when they've been there, and also research you've done this month if you plan to send your characters someplace/time period during the novel [1890s London, 1950s Las Vegas, real estate listings on Zillow ...]

The basic thing is you want this to be something you can easily use in November so you can concentrate on writing for the month, rather than organizing your notes.