Finally got far enough along (21,055 words!) in creating the story world in Scrivener that I needed to start the Story Bible. Now I will finally have need of Aeon Timeline. Bought it a while back knowing I didn’t need it yet but would eventually. Eventually is now. Or pretty soon, anyway, but probably not until after NaNoWriMo so I won’t scramble my brain while I’m working on the rough draft. :)

Scrivener: Write Any Way You Want To

Scrivener lets me write the way I want to. Which means bouncing all over the place when I realize I need to change something in one place that also means I need to change something somewhere else. And that gives me another idea which changes another idea and leads to yet another one. See? All over the place. Not easy with one long document. A cinch with Scrivener. Work in one document if you prefer. Or do like I do and break it up in as many different ways as you like. Scrivener makes doing your Story Bible easy too. You may not always need that but sometimes you may. At my current level of development for this project I definitely want one. Worlds, races and religions, oh my! I shudder at the thought of keeping all those ideas in my goofy little brain or on one long page of scribbled notes.

Here’s a screenshot of the novel in Scrivener, edited to keep secrets, well, secret. This image is much reduced. Click on it for the full size image in all its (redacted) glory. ;)

With everything I’ve written in Scrivener I’ve used a different setup. I start a project in the simplest way with hardly any folders. (Notice the folder for Unused Scenes, ones I want to use but haven’t figured out where they go yet. I sometimes name this folder Unordered Scenes.) But as the work evolves so does my workspace. I also keep a database outside Scrivener in DEVONthink Pro Office. I try to keep mostly simple text files in Scrivener along with a few images. This keeps the project slim and backups fast. Autosave is set in Preferences to every 2 seconds of inactivity, backups to when I close the project and to save to Dropbox, I manually backup to a folder on my laptop (which my Airport Time Capsule backs up automatically for me every day).

Aeon Timeline: Untangle Those Storylines

Here is an interesting looking post about using Scrivener and Aeon Timeline by a published author who uses both. (I know nothing about the author or his books having only just discovered him, but I’m enjoying his post and blog, and have just begun watching one of his many videos on writing.)

More than just a timeline: Track all the information that matters

“Aeon Timeline is more than a series of events on a never ending line. With Aeon, you can divide your timeline into logical groups, projects, or concurrent arcs. You can model the relationships between events and people, places and ideas. Aeon calculates people’s ages for you. And you can link your events with research material such as external files or images that can be displayed inside the application.” I cheated and copied this from the website. I  haven’t used it enough to say anything intelligent about it yet except I think it will help me keep from getting overwhelmed. I’ll let you know how that goes. :)

Thanks for reading. I hope some of this was helpful. Now back to writing. Right after a late lunch. (The dawgs are finally asleep and I hate to wake them up, but I’m starving! All this novel-writing and blog-posting is hard work, ya know!) Peace be with you! :)