Before working with the assumption that you definitely want to write all three (and eventually up to eight) novels of this series into one single project, I figured it would be good to suggest an alternative. It is of course fine to combine books that way, but it’s worth noting that there are other ways you can go, where each book is in its own project, with its own metadata, without losing the ability to associate material with links/bookmarks back to a central universe building project (and even each other). The basic idea is outlined in this post, and may be worth some consideration if that looks like it could work for you.
It won’t work for every scenario though, sometimes you would want to be able to run a search in one project to find every scene a character is involved in over multiple novels, for example. So the next question is whether or not having different keywords for essentially the same thing, just because they are used in different books, is what works best. You mention using for instance “Planet Name-1”, for presumably the same exact planet. The notion of searching for that planet within one single novel is what you’re going for, but I feel there are better ways of going about that, than having eight different keywords for the same thing.
There are definite advantages toward this approach:
- The decision to make some keywords universal and other keywords book-specific is not something you have to make beforehand. Keywords exist simply to mark things as relating to that thing, regardless of how you might want to use it.
- That decision to narrow the focus of how a keyword is used is then made at the point of implementation, and thus means your keywords are overall more flexible for it. Maybe the occasion hasn’t arisen yet, but maybe you do eventually want to run a search for that character across several novels. With keywords that are acting as compound factors up front you would have to set up a search for all the keywords associated with that character, which sounds like it may be a pain if the are all sorted into several different subcategories of keyword.
- There is already a key point of information embedded in the structure of your binder: the organisation of multiple books into folders. This is information that we can actually make use of in a search, making the information currently embedded in the keyword redundant.
Here is how to use the binder itself as a kind of search criteria (I recommend showing the Collections tab list from the View menu):
- First, select the top-level folder that contains all of the content for the book you want to search within. You only want that one folder selected.
- Clear the project search settings with the “Reset Search Options” command, in the magnifying glass menu.
- Set it to “Search In: Keywords”.
- Search the “Search Binder Selection Only” setting. This is the key ingredient.
- Set any other settings that you find appropriate.
- Type in the keyword you want to search for.
And there you go. You now have this keyword being searched for, but only within that one novel. To show off a little of the flexibility here, go back to the Binder and select two novels with Cmd-click, then click back on the Search Results tab. So this is what I mean about moving the implementation into the search action itself, rather than trying to pack all of that into the metadata itself. With this approach you only need one keyword for each important thing you wish to track, one master list to take care of.
At this point you may be wondering about the long setup phase required to make this work. What you’ll want to do after setting this up is this:
- From the search results tab, disable the “Search Binder Selection Only” setting. You’ll need to do that to save the other settings as a collection.
- Go ahead and do that now, maybe calling it something like “Keyword Search”.
- Once you have the new selection set up and active in the binder sidebar, click on the magnifying glass and set the binder selection option again.
Now it should be working as expected again. We have to do this dance because it was decided that saving that option into collections would be too confusing for the unsuspecting. It’s a setting that can very easily result in confusing results if you aren’t prepared for it. But this approach was left in for those that know what they are doing and definitely want that behaviour saved into a collection.
From this point on need only use the following steps to search like this:
- Again, select the book(s) in the binder you want to focus the search on.
- Click on the “Keyword Search” collection.
- Type in the keyword you want to search for.
Once you type in a new keyword you’ll note that it drops back to regular search results. Collections don’t automatically modify themselves when you change the search term itself. All we are thus using this collection for is a way to save our specific project search settings, more as a kind of “mode” for searching. It’s a useful technique to consider using in general, particularly if you find yourself switching between project search settings in a repetitive way.
In the end, if you do want to carry on working the way you have, that’s all right. You probably will run into clutter issues, but with how you can nest keywords into groups and keep the ones you aren’t working on at the moment collapsed, it shouldn’t be too bad. Personally I would use a different naming scheme if I went that route, like “BookName - Planet”, so I don’t have to memorise which number means what, but there may be something to be said for the efficiency of “Planet-1” in that you can let auto-complete handle the bulk of the typing for you.
I don’t know, maybe that would introduce further complications I’m not aware of, but maintaining a huge list of keywords across eight projects sounds like a lot of work to me, and I’d wonder if there were not other things that were being replicated around as well, like descriptions of locations.