I am writing a series made up of trilogies. Each novel is typically 150K-words or so. I want to use Aeon Timeline and sync across the whole series. There is no ability to sync one AT document with multiple Scrivener projects. I was on the AT forum recently and someone suggested putting the entire series in one Scrivener project. They posited that because it’s based on markdown files that only load when selected the project size would not be an issue.
I’d like to know if anyone has done this (a large series in one Scrivener project) and also if they’ve had issues syncing such a large project with AT. Any particular problems or things I ought to know before giving it a try?
I’d really like the functionality promised by being able to keep AT and Scrivener in sync due to the complexity of the timelines I’m working with.
I suggested on aeon timeline a coups ways to do it. But would suggest a new master project. Migrate all the keywords, labels and custom meta data into the new project.
Now drag in book one manuscript only into book one folder. Add book two folder rinse and repeat till have 10 book folders with none of the research. If project is sluggish, first delete all snapshots that were pulled in. If still sluggish, then delete the text inside the scenes. Original books have that. Aeon pulls in and syncs custom metadata in form of text files and keywords,as well as acts, chapter, and scenes.
I suggest adding a new custom metadata field called story notes( wrapped text). I use this field to add notes on any thing I might need to add to a book. If add to that field I add scene to an “Update” static collection and delete from the collection as address the issue.
On the aeon side add a relationship called books (or could give short name label for each book in the series. Now can select multiple narrative items in book one and associate with book one relationship. I also made the events for each book 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. I hope this makes sense to you. Message me if not.
It’s not that much. Unless you have everything in just one document
Scrivener manages large projects with many documents well. But such general statements don’t really help.
I’ll venture a more specific statement that has proven itself for my documents. Of course, it may be different for others.
The optimal number (for me) is a maximum of 3,000 documents per project. The more documents there are in a project, the slower the search is. Everything else is no problem for Scrivener. At least, I’ve never noticed any issues.
Aeon needs only the binder title, a synopsis if you want one, custom metadata, keywords, dates if you want to use the timeline in a text format. It does not sync the actual text of the novel, so if a series project became slow with the text of 10 novels. strip the text of the combo project and it will function better and aeon would never know.
