The writers at the group blog Magical Words have developed an interesting little piece of software called Character Keeper, an AIR-based program intended to keep track of character profiles and other snippets of information related to your book. Becuase it’s AIR, Adobe’s stand-alone Flash platform, it will run on any computer that can run current versions of Flash (though you’ll need to install the AIR runtime if it’s not alreadyon your system).

The program is quite simple — each note has a descriptive headline, a category (intended to keep separate your notes for different projects), and a large text space for free-form text writing. On the right-hand side, notes (they call them “clips”) are organized by category, allowing you to skim through all the notes related to a particular project. The program features one-click copying of theentire note so you can easily copy-and-paste your notes into whatever document you’re working on.

Character Keeper is a simple little application that doesn’t do much, but it may well fit into your writing workflow. It’s free at the moment; the site seems to implythat they’ll be charging for it in thefuture, but unless they add significant new features Ican’t imagine it being worth paying for. As a free app, though, it’s certainly worth a try.

Character Keeper (free)