Thanks. I’ll check it out.
Followup question. I watched the video you put up, thank you. I do things a little differently, but before I try to put everything in one Scrivener project, I have a pre-emptive question and it’s fine if you don’t know the answer (maybe someone else will).
I write the 4-Act structure almost exclusively and set up my Scrivener folders to reflect that (with the prologue and epilogue being outside the main narrative). So I’d have Prologue, Main Narrative (Act 1, Act 2A, Act 2B, Act 3), and Epilogue. Not all my stories have both prologue and epilogue, but the point about Acts stands.
I do it this way to mind my story-level pacing. I’m not on outliner, but more of a pantser or plotser, so I keep a close eye on the word-count per Act as I write. So if my goal is 100K-words for the novel, then each Act is 25K-words. With several novels in one Scrivener document, how does one limit the word-count displayed to just the novel one is working on? I know you can select the Act folder in the binder and get word-count that way, but I rather like the ability to easily determine where I am on Act word-count and Main Narrative word-count. It helps me stay on track and keeps my story from meandering as I discover it.
Any tips on maintaining this ability with multiple novels in one Scrivener project would be appreciated.
Thanks again.
Great question. I’ve made a video showing an approach that hopefully fits your workflow:
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Thank you. This is very helpful.
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Following up on what Steve showed. Here is a written method that works like above with several tweaks and I will include pictures. My pictures are on version 3.4
How to have multiple Novels from a Series on the Same Aeon Timeline?
On the Scrivener Side:
- Suggest a new master project.
- Migrate all the keywords, labels and custom metadata into the new project.
- Now drag in book one manuscript only into your book one folder. Add book two folder rinse and repeat till have 10 book folders with none of the research.
- If project becomes sluggish during the process of importing novels, then first delete all snapshots that were pulled in.
- If still sluggish, then delete the text inside the scenes. Your original books will retain the source material.
Aeon pulls in and syncs custom metadata in the form of text files and keywords, as well as acts, chapters, and scenes as Narrative Events, but without the Scene text material.
Consider expanding the Synopis info for a brief scene description and can choose to display or not in Aeon Timeline.
- New Custom Metadata field: “Story Notes”- I suggest adding a new custom metadata field called Story Notes (wrapped text). I use this field to add notes on anything I might need to add to a book.
- Static Collection: “Update”- If add to this field because of needed changes, then I add the scene where changes are needed to a static Collection called “Update”. As I address issues for the items in this Collection, I remove them from the Collection. This collection can include scenes from any of the books.
Pro Tip- as I suggest for Aeon Timeline, use a custom icon for each scene from one book, so each series has its own custom icon. So when you are correcting items, the icon identifies visually what book it is from. (You could have a key file in Project Bookmarks to look at if needed.) Then open the “Update” Static Collection and delete entries from it as you address the issue.
On the Aeon Timeline Side: - Add a Book Relationship: On the Aeon Timeline side, add a relationship called Books [Label each book in the series by number or an abreviation of the Title.] Now, you can select multiple narrative items in Book one and associate these with the Book one relationship.
- Give each Book in the series a Unique Event Color: I also made the events for each Book in the series a unique color to help differentiate the books. With this setup, you can use the filter view to isolate one or more books to analyze interactions and the timeline. A glance at the color of the event, immeadiately identifies which Book it is from in views that are chronologically based. [Timeline, Subway, Relationship and Spreadsheet views]
I hope this makes sense to you. Message me if not.
Images are from example where I pulled in project with a fully realized novel done twice to simulate adding two books. Book one is EG1 (Earth Guardian) and EG2 for Book 2 in the relationship field. You can then filter by one book or even several books to analyze what you are doing. Book one is green, book 2 is purple.
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