Hi there, has anyone worked out a way to link/sync multiple scrivener projects to a single Aeon timeline document?
Is the development team working on this feature?
Thanks
Unfortunately no, there isn’t a way to do this at the moment.
It isn’t something that is currently being worked on, but is on our feature request to consider adding in the future (it would have to involve adding the ability to have multiple Narratives).
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Why complicate things? A single Narrative and a single Scrivener project provide the ability to (in my case) plot and write a multi-novel series. In fact, even if this feature were to be added, I wouldn’t use it. (I respect others who would use it, though.)
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I know people that write large series of novels all in one Scrivener project. It has many advantages to keep the stuff together in one project.
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I know this is an older topic, but I’d just like to add my two cents to what OP suggested and express that there are users who continue to hope for this feature.
My entire use case of Aeon in v2 revolved around syncing multiple projects to the same timeline. It was invaluable for tracking dates and events across multiple interconnected series and books.
Transferring my existing timelines to v3 was quite difficult because it required choosing only one project to sync with. Regretfully I gave up on syncing my timeline to any Scrivener projects at all.
I still desperately miss the multiple syncing in v3. I would be very grateful to the devs if they would one day reintroduce this feature to Aeon!
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Vela, out of curiosity (and not to be argumentative), since a single Scrivener project can contain a series (including a book series), why not just do that? There must be at least one reason I’m just not thinking of.
That’s a great question, and I’m sure that would work really well for a lot of authors! It’s definitely worth considering, but I didn’t find it a good fit for me for a few reasons.
I write epic fantasy, so my series are long (10 or so books), and each book is roughly 200,000 words. It gets pretty unwieldy to store that many manuscripts in one big Scrivener project. I admittedly haven’t tested it on Scrivener 3, which would surely handle things faster, but I had performance issues on Scrivener 2 loading just 2 books in one project.
I think it would pose some challenges with compiling because it’s less convenient to enable/disable which documents you need to export for each book, plus juggling multiple front and back matters.
And unfortunately, storing each series in the same Scrivener project still wouldn’t help with time-lining events across interconnected series.
But this is just my experience, and I can see storing an entire series in one Scrivener project being very convenient for other authors. 
Thank you for the suggestion though!
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Makes perfect sense, Vela.
I’m on my first novel of a four-novel fantasy series. I’m only on my first novel in terms of writing (about a fourth of the way through the first draft), though I’ve outlined the series in AT3. So far, my approach of having a single Scrivener project seems to be working, but time will tell! Thanks for your perspective on this – you definitely have way more experience than I do.
I kn ow this is an old topic, but I’m now really starting to work with AT and I’d love to sync it with Scrivener.
I too am writing a fantasy series (possibly 5 books as the main series + several standalones that might also turn into series in the same world, but that’s for the far future).
In my one Scrivener project I planned to have all the books, including all the (developmental and line-editing) drafts of each book.
What are your experiences so far a year later?
Is it even possible to work with multiple drafts of the same book for which the timeline might change from draft to draft?
Thank you for sharing your experiences! @SCN @velarothauthor
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Only curious: Why don’t you just stick with your established workflow and keep Aeon Timeline 2?
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At the risk of beating a dead horse … I would really like some way to link up the novels in my series. I use Scrivener on Mac and as my series grows I keep coming back to this. Is there a way to reference another timeline and hence its narrative as a sub-document in a master timeline? Or could this be added to it? That way the sub-document would be the one that syncs to any particular Scrivener document, rather than have Aeon Timeline sync to multiple Narratives across multiple Scrivener documents. I don’t write monster-of-the-week type of series, or problem-of-the-week type of series, but story arcs that extend over several book (usually, three, or trilogies) with shared characters and timelines that need to stay organized.
Bumping this request. I think there are plenty of reasons why you would need to have multiple projects sync to a single timeline, for example my series has multiple narratives and does not follow a single story.
I wonder as a work around can you import parts of scrivener as entries, or change which entyh is the one that is currently in sync? It wouldn’t keep it synced, but you could at least have older entries, ones that will not changed imported into the timeline, then bounce between syncing projects as needed. Not ideal…but possible? Never tried and because one time I lost some material playing with sync options in the timeline, a little hesitant to try!
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Since a Scrivener project can gracefully contain a book series, and since AT can gracefully sync to it while taking advantage of a single timeline for all the books, why not do that? I say this because this would accomplish your goal of multiple narratives written against a single timeline.
Here is a thought to consider. Keep the seperate books each in a scrivener collection, though using compile collections it is easy to compile one book in a project that holds several. But putting this aside why not start a new project and bring in novel 1 and its metadat, keywords, labels etc. Now strip out the text leaving the title. Now do this for all the book in the series. This requires using one set of custom metadata across the epic.
Now with text stripped out the project is small and can be placed on one aeon timeline.
You can create a document with bookmark links to each novel in the series and place this in Project bookmarks so can open the link file from anywhere to open the needed book in the series.
Downside would need to update any substanial info changes, but create a collection of scenes that had changes and periodically go thru the collection and delete items as you update data in the original.
A thought
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Not sure what you’re saying here. The text of the scenes is not in AT at all.
“You can create a document with bookmark links to each novel in the series and place this in Project bookmarks so can open the link file from anywhere to open the needed book in the series.”
Don’t get that either.
Sometimes it seems like you’re talking Scrivener features and other times Aeon ones, but I’m truly not understanding.
One of the issues I’m thinking this will cause is a problem with data integrity, i.e. multiple existing versions. As it is, it’s a huge pain to have a Scrivener file, a Vellum file, and an AT file and making sure that each change is applied across all three. For example, in book 5 I may create an event that took place within the time period covered by book 1 and I’d have to add that to AT but not necessarily to the Scrivener or Vellum files. OTOH, a typo would be changed in the Scrivener file and then pushed to Vellum and eventually to publication. Everyone’s workflow would be different, of course, but I think one of the reasons that people are asking for actual multi-sync is because the work-arounds are so cumbersome or prone to error.
Why remove text is to reduce project size given the size of your novels . You can have a relationship category for books which can be used to filter to view the timeline, narrative, subway views, etc and as mentioned aeon doesn’t sync the text.
You could as mentioned have a custom metadata text field called story notes and if make changes can add to a static collection making easy to know what to update. As fix delete from the collection .
Please invite me to stop if I’m beating a dead horse. It’s just that I’m writing a three-novel series with Scrivener and Aeon Timeline synced, and it works gracefully–even though I have a “prequel” scene that appears well after it would appear if the novel were following a strictly chronological order.
Let’s say you have a five-novel series in one Scrivener project. Each novel is written in its own folder, along these lines:
In Aeon Timeline, your events are shown chronologically in Timeline, Spreadsheet, Subway, and Relationship views, without regard to how you place these events into your novels. But the narrative order of events, shown in Narrative or Outline views*, can place events into any novel without regard to where the event falls on the timeline; so an event that took place in the time period of, say, Book 1 can be placed into the Book 5 narrative.
When you sync Aeon Timeline and Scrivener, it will sync Aeon Timeline’s narrative-order scenes with Scrivener’s narrative scenes, exactly where you wish to portray them in your novel. Yet its timeline remains strictly chronological.
Isn’t this exactly what you want to achieve?
In case it’s helpful, here’s how I set things up in Aeon Timeline, using Novel > Chapter > Scene > Passage
I’m not familiar with Vellum, so maybe there’s a workflow issue that would prevent this kind of simple setup.
Steve
* In the forthcoming version 3.5, you’ll have more options on how to display things.
Oh I see what you mean now. Thank you for the clarification .
Follow-up questions:
I write novels that are about 150K words each. Have you run into issues of the files getting too big?
Also, how do you use the Narrative part? I’d love to see how others actually use it.
Thanks again.
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I’m very glad this is starting to make sense.
I write novels that are about 150K words each. Have you run into issues of the files getting too big?
I think Scrivener can easily handle novels of that length. The way it works under the hood is that each “scene” or “passage” (if you follow the kind of setup I’m using) is a separate RTF file. So all Scrivener is doing is loading each file according to what you are selecting in the binder. You might be looking at just one scene by itself, or all of the scenes of your novel; it doesn’t matter, because it’s just loading each file serially (but very fast). If you write all the novels in one Scrivener project, as I am doing, it can handle them because of how it works: It’s not loading one massive file before it can display anything; it’s loading the documents (scenes or passages) one at a time, according to what you’ve selected in the binder. It’s a brilliant thing, really.
Also, how do you use the Narrative part? I’d love to see how others actually use it.
I’m using the beta version 3.5, so I might confuse you if I make a video using this version. However, a while back I made a shoot-from-the-hip video for another writing community, where I show how I use Scrivener together with Aeon Timeline 3 to write my multi-novel series. Perhaps it will be helpful. But please, come back with questions if you need to.
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I think the most important concept is that the Timeline, Spreadsheet, Relationship, and Subway views are timeline views. They show events in the order they occurred.
On the other hand, the Narrative and Outline views show events as they appear in your novel or novels, whether in chronological order or not. Moving them around in these views does not change their order in the Timeline, Spreadsheet, Relationship, and Subway views.
Scrivener syncs with the Aeon Timeline Narrative/Outline views, so changing the order of things in Scrivener will change the order of things in the Narrative and Outline views, and vice versa. However, none of these changes in the order will change the order in Timeline, Spreadsheet, Relationship, or Subway views (unless you explicitly change the date of the event in the Inspector).
From a workflow perspective, we’re all different. In my case, I outline in the Outline view. I’m writing a fantasy where the exact dates/times are not important until a later stage, and that’s when I move to the Spreadsheet view to nail down dates and times. Others prefer to start in the Timeline or Spreadsheet view because nailing down dates/times is more important. I would imagine writing historical fiction would fit this approach best.
I hope this is helpful.
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