Ya think? 
That does not work for those of us who use it as a rudimentary project management tool. Use that has nothing to do with writing but everything to do with tracking/managing simple (typically one person) projects.
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I don’t want it to be a writing tool!
It’s a timeline tool and should work as one! What it should have is a few interchangeable export formats in a file format standard for open data transfer in addition to something really simple as a markdown file with YAML header where metadata was stored as key pairs, and where the different text field was sections in the note.
People should be able to define what entities and attributes in Aeon was metadata and what was sections in the note.
Import from markdown could work just the same as the CSV import where you could select what was metadata and what was different “notes” for the object.
It should be up to the user to set up the Template for the Aeon project and the Markdown project correctly before using the feature.
This way, the developers of Aeon could focus on the important features, like an export to web, export to SVG, get multiple calendars to work, making a calendar function that can hold holidays and moving free days, relations that actually works, constraints that works etc. etc.
And no, it is not a problem to export this to markdown, I already do it with an open-source script for the csv file, but there is limitations with the csv in the use case (sadly), one of them is that I need to add a step in my workflow, and the second is that it is not possible to update the AEON Project with new markdown data in an easy way.
so no, I definitely don’t want Aeon to be a writing tool, I want it to be an even better tool for researching time-based events and relationships between people, places, events, and documents for this timeline.
If anything, Aeon should come with a full network graph view with a time series selector so that you could select a specific period in time and look at the relationships and events in that period and also so that you could see how relationships between events, people, places and other objects changed over time.
Something similar to what Palladio or Constellation have.
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I’d see Plottr as emphasising ease of use and simplicity.
Whereas Aeon’s timeline functionality is intrinsically detailed and complex. And, despite best possible efforts, it’s nowhere near as easy to use. More capable instead for those who need the extra.
Where Plottr could be better, in my opinion, is if you could more readily tie notes to scene cards.
For instance, a minor character plays a role in Chapters 1 and 12. I should see that character’s notes when I focus on either chapter. Any edits I make from either instance should be applied to the note’s master copy.
Obsidian’s Canvas feature works great for that sort of thing.
I’d agree completely.
I’m not an active user of Plottr really. I play with it from time to time but that’s all. Doesn’t tick enough boxes, though I appreciate the design and ease of use.
I second this, as an editor and author. Too often I have heard outlandish claims from people who write tools for authors.
The one that burned into my memory was “One scene can only belong to one subplot. That is a fact of writing novels.” Said the lead architect of that tool and all the other representatives of the company nodded.
I gave up explaining the concept of key scenes as a possible culmination of several subplots when it became obvious this was their stand and facts did not matter. Because THEY KNEW BETTER.
They suggested creating several copies of that scene, one for each subplot, and duplicating all of the common information in each one. If I insisted on breaking this rule they knew to be true.
¯\(ツ)/¯
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Also from authors , editors, publishers, and those selling their latest ‘How to …’
Writers vary, their processes vary, their productivity varies and so does their quality. And there’s no shortage of very successful writers who only write poorly constructed and written novels.
I’ve noticed that whiteboards encourage me into an entirely chaotic process. I suppose that should be ‘enables’ - my mind is comfortable with chaos, and less comfortable with structure. If this turns out to be a productive process, then it will lie outside all the recommendations I have ever seen.
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I’m curious – what do you mean by “chaos”? I’m having a hard time understanding how a truly chaotic thought process accomplishes anything. Do you mean that you work nonlinearly – perhaps jumping around to different parts of the story as ideas occur to you?
This assumes that there’s one story.
I mean that not only do I not know where in a story a scene might occur, but it might be from an entirely different story and world. And I don’t know yet.
I’ll accept this. I make the assumption that what emerges isn’t actually chaotic, just that it can seem like that to my conscious mind. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and I have barely started collecting ingredients as yet.
In practice pantsers (I suspect that has become a politically incorrect term), never know where they are going, but they always know where they are now and where they have been. That’s not entirely dissimilar.
To be fair, there’s an element of always having had this going on anyway. My mind is always spinning off ideas, some obviously connected but some less so. In the past I have treated these as a burden and distraction, but I’ve always been aware that this is where everything springs from. And not only true for creative writing, but also academic and other factual work. My (unconscious) mind seems not to follow a single thread. I’m trusting that the threads will come later in the process, and that I can at that point follow the weave with fewer distractions from other ideas since I have already taken them onboard.
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That lead architect will be stunned and amazed if anyone ever invents a thing called a flashback. 
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I like your description of how you experience your unconscious mind but also how you can focus (have fewer distractions) when it’s time to do that.
Out of curiosity, how do you work with Aeon Timeline when you write fiction? In my case, I use it to brainstorm and outline my novel as well as to keep track of things as I flesh it out in Scrivener. (I keep both programs open on my screen, side by side.)
I’m afraid I don’t much. I only ever use it to problem solve or allow me to track a detailed timeline on the very few occasions I need to to that.
I was never productive with Scrivener.
I don’t like too much noise when I’m writing (reviewing and editing are different). I have two routes - writing in Writage/Word/Atlantis/Typora, absorbing data from markdown files etc as necessary or writing in WriteMonkey3/Inspire Writer/Obsidian. All in a focus mode. Difference between the two is whether I need to write in paragraphs, or whether I can write in markdown lines and only convert to paragraphs at the end.
Factual stuff tends to be Tangent Notes/Word/Atlantis. Though I’m considering Hepta where there’s a lot of use of external material.
I have planned extensively in the past, but that’s always caused a creative tension. One of my first observations about Plottr was that it would be particularly useful to analyse an existing first draft.
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Cool. It never ceases to amaze me how many paths writers take.
This is something similar to place Events in historical research…
You know that something happened before and after, but it is not always you know everything in between, but as you research goes on, you find more and more historical events that needs to be placed in between other events…
And then you find an item or some people that occur in multiple events, e.g., ships and sailors that change ships they sail on, ports visited etc.
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I think it’s something that can apply in all areas of research and investigation.
Ideas will usually start by being related to something. If that something is from working with a whiteboard, I will add it as a textbox (Canvas - card) on that board.
If I don’t know where it came from or it’s more substantial, I will make it a note with wikilinks. Ditto for anything factual. And then I will add that note to any whiteboard where they might fit.
Some research is linear, of course, but much isn’t.
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Yes, that is true, at least in most historical research/investigation (research with some kind of chronologic approach) you will start somewhere without knowing what you will find, and I think that will be true for many writers to, they start their history and then figure out that they need something that explain why something happened or why a person occurs somewhere in their story etc.
what I miss in AT 3 is a way to visually show relationships between events and/or objects in the timeline that are not dependencies/constraints.
I may have dozens of events or objects in the timeline that are related in some way and that I would like to have a visual line that I could have followed…
This is easy when using markdown and wikilinks in Foam for VSC or Obsidian, or when using network graph software and is an extremely good tool for finding “hidden” relationships between events, people and other objects.
Have you ever thought of expressing these relationships using arcs?
I have tried, but not sure how I can add one or ten Event to 8-10 different “parents” in a visual way, it’s not that they belong to a story or an event, but they can have some kind of relation…
It’s not a problem in Aeon to link using relations, but it is not visual and it is not easy to see all the links in a table or list view when you hav 15-25000 (or more) events, people and other objects in a project.
Only way to add an item in Aeon to multiple “parents” is to make copies…
So e.g., if you want a ship to be a sub-item in an event on your timeline and at the same time be an owned object under a company as a child object, only way to do that is to create duplicate object for the ship.
EDIT: An example (I keep to ships this time):
The ship is owned by a Norwegian company, so I want it as a sub-item in the Company’s hierarchy to easily see all the ships I have registered on that company.
But I also want to have the ship as an sub-item of an event called journey, so that I can register the ships movement and add seamen to the ship for that journey.
If I only add a relation between the Ship and the Event, and then add relations between the Seamen and the Event, I will have no relation between the ship and the seamen.
So, I have no way to find out what ship a seaman was sailing on at a given time… It actually just become an extreme mess.
Therefore, I need to be able to add an Item in AT as sub-items to multiple other Items in the database, both to timeline items and to left sidepanel hierarchical “collection items”.
It is very seldom that my “parent collection items” also are a “parent timeline item”, but a “parent timeline item” can very often be a sub-item of a “collection”.
e.g., a ship is a sub-item of the shipping line and/or owner of the ship, it is also a sub-item of multiple journey events, and the ship as a sub-item to the journey event can have multiple sub-items linked to it, like ship documents, manifests etc. for the journey, and of course the seamen onboard should be linked with a relation to the correct sub-item (like a crew list or a manifest) …
If I only create relations between the ship as a sub-item of the “collection” and the journey event, and then start to add relations for seamen to the journey or create relations between the documents and seamen (the documents are of course sources so it should be registered as that in addition as sub-items of a repository), I have no visual way to see the relations between different sub-items regardless of if they are “collection sub-items” or “timeline sub-items”…
And if I just start to add ALL the seamen with a relation to the ship as a sub-item in a collection, I will not have any date/period definitions of when they actually sailed on that ship.
I actually use Foam and Obsidian or Cytoscape to find those relations, but it would be nice to be able to combine a “real” timeline with a network graph.
I’m surprised Plottr is so popular compared to Timeline, but I do seem to see more of the Plottr guys on podcasts/YouTube etc. I think Aeon would do well to get on shows like Mark Dawson’s. Or maybe they have, and I’ve just missed it?
I’ve dabbled with Timeline when it was version 1. And until recently, I’ve been using Plottr which is very easy to use. But in the end, I found myself coming up against limitations. I’m also not fond of how it looks. I know that shouldn’t matter, but when I spend a lot of time in an app, I want it to look well designed.
So I wondered if Aeon Timeline was still going. Turns out it was, and it’s up to version 3. Also, I actually don’t think it’s that difficult to use. There’s a bigger learning curve compared to Plottr, but not by much. And once things clicked (about two days into the free trial, so probably three or four hours at most), the extra power and flexibilty is really noticeable. It also looks a lot nicer than Plottr!!
So Plottr is ditched and I’m on board with Aeon Timeline. In future, it would be nice if more people saw its many benefits over Plottr.
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