Titles come last, usually

I was talking to my Dad the other day and mentioned that I'm getting ready to start work on a new novel, getting everything straight in my head. Because nobody wants to be a "pantser" forever.
My Dad was fascinated by this. He couldn't understand how I can keep all that in my head. He said he would forget it all before he got halfway through.

The best explanation I could come up with was to say it's like a movie, one that you've seen a lot, so you're just telling the story the way it exists already. Except it came from your head.

But it's already in my head. All of it. I just have to unearth it, scrape off the layers of junk and dust and pull it whole from where it is. That won't be done until it's all written, but I need to find the barest bones of it so I can get my synopsis done. Which is always handwritten in a special notebook I keep just for such things-bits of dialogue, scene ideas, character studies, lists of names, stuff like that. Not all of it ends up being used, but eventually I may find use for the discarded stuff-for my last novel The Black Dragon I ended up using a scene I'd planned for a different book, and I have every confidence that eventually these things will turn up useful.

It's about elves, and an elf war, and a spy, and another spy, and an Elf Queen who wants to destroy the planet.

Sound fun?