Good god, longhand! A whole novel that way? Wow!
Well, not exactly. It's really the Zeroth Draft of the novel, which loosely means "a bunch of notes converging upon an extended outline, with variable levels of detail."
So far I've been jotting notes down upon human history in this future; the ecology, sociology, and energy economy of the planet; a few pages about the culture and 'magic system' of the AIs; a page about the POV character (who is not the protagonist); and a page about the primary villain. Plot has barely been touched upon. It probably won't be for a while, unless I feel like hitting it for a day or two, then jumping back up to the big picture.
Doing this in pen means I can't hit the Delete key and spend hours mulling over getting each detail "right." I write something down, then I move on. Once it's written down it can't be taken back easily; it can only be built upon.
This has been very productive for me. So far each page is taking about half an hour. And there's already a lot of stuff in here. This is going to be a fairly complex storyline, and this is the best way I could think of to break out of my habit of stalling and/or skipping the planning stage. By the time I sit down in Emacs for the first draft, I'll have a world, characters,
and an entire plot. I might diverge wildly from them as I fill in the prose, but they'll be there to come back to. I won't get lost in the middle.
And it's surprisingly fun. I'm enjoying every page I write, despite the sore fingers. (My handwriting probably shows, too, that I'm not used to writing with a pen.)