I’ve written a rather big first draft (>100000 words) and am looking for the way to organize bits and pieces with a timeline. aeontimeline does not have a windows version, and the method described in http://www.jamierubin.net/2011/08/11/building-and-managing-story-timelines-using-scrivener/ does not work, because Scrivener for windows does not have the option to add custom meta-data fields.
Any ideas?
Check out The Timeline Project http://sourceforge.net/projects/thetimelineproj/. It’s open source (free 
) and you can create a file for your project in a folder on your computer that can be opened right from Scrivener by creating a reference link to either the file or the program in your Project/Document References section of the Inspector panel. Alas, it doesn’t open the file IN Scrivener, it actually has to open the program on your computer in a separate window, which kills the portability factor (you have to install Timeline on each computer you use it at), but it’s still a great resource for organizing timelines.
There’s also Al Mansur’s stuff http://rusnam.org/software/software.html but I haven’t used his addons in a long time. It’s a little bit more involved working with Scrivener which is why I dumped using his organization tools for just using timeline as described above.
Great, thanks for the Timeline project. Will definitely try it. I also tried Awrit by Al Mansur, but found it too complicated to set up.
I’ve been looking for a more efficient timeline than the one given away at Microsoft, so I downloaded both programs you mentioned.
I had no problem setting up either one, but working with Awrite-- Mansur’s prog-- is definitely for super-techies. The other one looks much more at my level of comprehension ;}
BTW: Is Mansur in LA? My boyfriend worked with a tech genius with that same last name a few years ago…
Thanks for the tip!
If all you really need is a place to put a date, try putting it in the beginning of each synopsis.
If you’re not going to include the titles of any of your documents in the final output, you could instead put the date at the beginning of each title. If you tell things out of order, a collection could be helpful, or you could print out your index cards and tack them to the wall or something.
At least Aeon says they’ve switched gears to get a Windows version worked up. No timeline, ha ha, on that yet.
I agree the rest of you; I only mentioned awrit because I used it, briefly, before I discovered The Timeline Project. Awrit would work a lot better only if you use the software in a portable way, and Scrivener ain’t exactly designed to do that yet. And about the techie stuff. Well, I too prefer to be using Scrivener for…, you know…, writing more than anything else 
. They’re both good pieces of software, I just thought I’d throw them in there.
No, I don’t need a place to put a date. I need a real timeline, with the possibility to move scenes easily back and forth. I like the way it is implemented in yWriter (unfortunately cannot switch to it because it currupts Cyrillic characters).