I did my revisions of The Poacher's Son using an inexpensive word processing program called Scrivener. (It's only available for Macs so if you don't have one, you can stop reading now.) It's a little tricky explaining what Scrivener is, but I'll start by quoting from Macworld's review of an earlier version (1.03):
Scrivener organizes each writing project, or draft, as a series of folders and files; each project can include relevant keywords, notes, and a brief synopsis. Outline and corkboard views provide drag-and-drop reordering of these elements, and the Edit Scrivenings button displays selected documents, or the entire draft, as a single document. It’s easy to assign custom labels for chapters, concepts, character sheets, and such, or set a status—first draft, rewrite, final draft—for individual draft items.
Another very cool thing about Scrivener is that that you don't have to switch back and forth between a bunch of applications to refer to research files. Instead you store all of your book research — image files, PDFs, movies, sound files, and web pages — inside Scrivener itself. Essentially, all of your work is available to you all the time.
Scrivener isn't exactly a replacement for Microsoft Word (although I wish it was) or Pages (which I'm lukewarm about). Eventually, you'll have to export your novel into another format, be it a .doc file or an .rtf. But it's ideal for getting your novel to the finish line.
Maybe someday I'll start getting paid for these endorsements.