Do you need Perl to write a novel? Indeed you don't and many, if not most, novelists write them without using it, and I'm positive about this. However, Perl can help you through the process of writing a novel and that's what I've done with the open source "Manuel the Magnificent Mechanical Man", which you can either buy in Amazon or download as a CPAN module. I'll talk about how I organized the workflow for writing the novel using Perl, Git, GitHub, and the modules and Perl features which helped me through the process.