Aeon Timeline - First Impressions 

I have been checking a ton of reviews on Aeon, and usually, I dip out within two minutes because I quickly realize that my writing methods don't match up with the reviewer's method, so the review wouldn't be helpful for me personally. But then you said you had a Twinnings #4 Earl Grey, and I immediately thought "he's my people. This is the review that will be the most helpful." And I was right! Thanks for this!

I’m at 6 minutes and already decided, forget it. Just the time to set this up! It’s made for people who can’t remember anything. Nah, not for me. Thank you for reviewing!!!

Thanks for your review,. much appreciated. I've been considering both Plottr and Aeon Timeline, and I have landed on the latter. Time will tell how useful it will be, but it looks promising.

The story arc thing is organizational. Let's say your story is about Jack and Jill's ascension of the hill behind Little Red Riding Hood's house. One story line would be Jack and Jill. Events like climbing the hill, the metaphysical thirst driving them, Jack's thwarted apotheosis, all that stuff would be added to the Jack and Jill story arc. The Little Red Riding Hood storyline would include Red's childhood, her journey to Grandma's house, the wolf's affection for Red from afar, and discovery of Grandma's fate. There might be another storyline for the wolf with his misunderstood youth, Grandma's evisceration, and the unsolved murder of the fourth little pig. Then, you can filter your views by story arc and see just Little Red's life or Jack and Jill's rock climbing, or perhaps Little Red's story arc as it relates to the wolf's passions. The spreadsheet is the best way to get data into the timeline, but there are other ways, too. For instance, I added custom fields to Devonthink for start, end, participant, arc, and other Aeon fields. If I use Devonthink's metadata summary export feature, I get a file Aeon will import without synchronization. Or, add extra columns to OmniOutliner for Aeon info. Export OO as CSV to import directly into Aeon. You get the timeline and all the relationships filled out in Aeon with zero extra fiddling. But what if I plan in Curio? Tag index cards that go in the timeline, search for that tag, and then export the search to CSV. The Aeon fields are added to the notes metadata for the index cards in the form of @@start=mm/dd/yy, @@relationship=participant, etc. A quickly written Python script transforms that into an input file for Aeon. Also, I believe I should probably click the "like" button on this video. If I've rattled on this much about it, I must have liked it. On reflection, yes, I did. Very nice presentation. More, please!

I just started with Aeon and that is how I found you. Like your review and am also on the third day of learning. And as I am an pantser I will use it while working to keep an overview so that I can look at my novel when writing the next in the series. Love it so far.

Great review! I'm currently using the Narrative View to keep track of my NaNoWriMo's WIP that I'm mainly pantsing. It's been super useful so far. I love that you don't really need to plan or get too detailed beforehand for it to be usefull at any point of the writing process. I create entities and events as I write and it helps me get a better view of the whole picture of the story I'm currently pantsing. It'll make revision and rewrites so much easier in the future!

This was a very enjoyable review - thank you! I have been using Aeon Timeline for a while now and played around with a dummy file quite a bit before using it on a real project. I find myself revisiting this dummy file quite often to try out something I'm not quite sure how to use or something I don't understand. Aeon Timeline is very powerful software but unforgiving. The facebook group are very helpful - there are a couple of very knowledgeable people there. Your suggestion of a series of video tutorials - maybe something similar to what L&L do with Scrivener would be a game changer for this software!

The flurry of Patreon videos was much appreciated. Many thanks!

Thank you so much for this review. I loved that you showed all the icons and the different ways to break up the screen. It looks like it's exactly the kind of software I could use. And the fact it syncs to Scrivener is perfect.

Thanks for putting this up.

I'm one of those crazy Linux desktop guys. I will have to play with one of the competitors to Aeon Timeline.

All those lines and colours...I'm already feeling anxiety. Seems so anti panster to me. I just jot my own notes down and write my story. But I do know there's value in a program like this. So I want to learn. 😁

Great review!! !wait for a new video about aeon timeline, please

Thank you, Michael.

So glad that you've finally caught up with Aeon v3. I remember you said that it wasn't your cup of tea (chilly or otherwise) a few years back but I find it well worth the investment in time (forget about cost) and the dividends valuable. It certainly is complex but it will become second nature - in time. Or is that timeline?

Is Scrivener still your main writing tool? Thanks for sharing as always, very interesting.

Thank you for getting me hooked on Twinings #4! You’re correct - an amazing cup of Earl Grey. I just wish there were more options to buy it on this side of the pond :-(

I don't know whether I just don't have a mind that works that way for fiction, or whether it's just my personality, but I could never bring myself to use any kind of outline. I just start writing, and keep writing until the thing is finished. I can do backstory or anything else without the aid of outlines, or even notes. I don't even want to know what is going to happen on the next page until I write it, and certainly don't want to know how it will end. To my surprise, when I looked at the writing methods of my twelve favorite writers not too long after I first started writing, eleven of them wrote the same way I do, and the twelfth did a very brief one page outline. I do not count Shakespeare in the twelve I first checked, but he did write some of his longest plays in a fortnight, with a quill pen, and often bragged that he "never blotted a line". I really was afraid that I was the only writer silly enough to write fiction that way. I've always written one draft with no rewriting or revising, and no editing except for sometimes tightening dialogue. Probably because an article about Robert Heinlein made me decide to write my first story, and this is how he said he wrote everything. For a pre0high school dropout with no knowledge of grammar at all until I read through a grammar book before writing that story it seems like a stupid choice, but it worked and that first 7,500 word short story written in two days sold to the first magazine I sent it to, and paid more than my day job did in a month. Robert Heinlein or not, though, I think that's just how my mind works. I hate plotting, so I never plotted anything. I hate attempting outlines, which I did try, so I just didn't outlining. My entire procedure has always been to find a title I love, and that title generates the first sentence, and the first sentence generates the story and I don't have to think about anything beyond the sentence I'm writing. It sounds dumb to some, impossible to others, but when you research writers throughout the last, well, since Shakespeare, a big bunch of very good writers worked just this way. Many of the pulp writers had to work this way, of course, because they had no time at all to do anything except sit down and write a salable first draft with no planning at all. Those who wrote the old time radio programs also had to be fast. I remember reading about one who took a train from the Midwest to California, a two day trip at the time, and he wrote seven finished, ready to go radio dramas in those two days. Some of the pulp writer wrote two novels a month, and a few wrote a novel a week. I know a science fiction writer who filled a hole in an editors catalog by writing a very, very good 100,000 word novel in three days. He started Friday, and finished it Sunday night. I can't even type that fast. Because of this, I came to believe that to a large degree, process affects product. I think there's a difference in novels, or short stories, and everything between, if they are written without an outline, without any planning in advance, and fiction that is heavily outlined and planned. Obviously, both can be excellent, both can, and have, become classics, and as I aged I came to love many writers who outlined heavily, though I still usually preferred those who did not. But I think they are different types of reads. They certainly seem different to me, largely in pacing, and very often in the amount of side story, and in the large amount of description and narrative. I think it's telling that just about every writer I loved for many years did not outline. I never know this until after I find a new writer I love. Only after I read a writers work and love it do I look up his or her method of writing. Or did. Honestly, I now read more classic novels, or reread my favorite writers of my youth, and far fewer new novels. There are novels, and a handful of nonfiction books, that I've read a dozen times, and I learn something new from each reading. I have started writing again, though what I can do now remains to be seen. My health is getting worse, not better, not even remaining steady, but you can only play the cards you're dealt, though I would certainly cheat if I could. But I can't so I may as well do my best to use whatever time I have left as well as I can. As a saying we have goes, "If nothing else, it's something to do." Having something to do matters, I think, and while I do many things, I need to do something else, something that matters, and I think writing is it. Bad health, yes, but my mind still works. . .I think. We'll see, I guess. I always wrote everything with a pencil at first, then with a fountain pen, if the deadline was long enough, and only used a typewriter or word processor if an editor wanted something yesterday. Now I'll just write with a fountain pen because I've found speech to text works just about perfectly with the latest version of MS Word. I've read several short stories into it, and it's just about flawless with almost zero training. Sorry for rambling on. It's just that I've always been fascinated by how different writers go about what is essentially the same task.

Thanks for helpful video. Can Aeon Timeline 3 show multiple timelines? Say you're writing about WW2 and you want a timeline for Churchill and one for FDR, Stalin and Hitler? Thanks.

Thanks for your review, Mike! I like Aeon Timeline a lot. As you say, it's very flexible, but, just as with Scrivener, there can be a learning curve that may put off some people. However, I think it's worth sticking at it and making it your own, focusing on the features that make sense to you and not worrying too much about the rest. I agree that there could be some better training videos made to help out. The only thing I don't like about Aeon is that you can't use the Julian calendar, much less have a timeline that goes from Julian to Gregorian: which sounds niche, but if you were planning a big non-fiction work about British history, this would be a bit of a problem. Similarly, if you wanted to write a biography of, say, Shakespeare, you have to be very, very careful about the week days automatically assigned by Aeon to dates you add to your Shakespeare timeline: do not rely on Aeon to give you the correct day of the week! Fortunately, you can get it to switch off the display of week days to prevent confusion. So if you need to remember that Shakespeare was baptised on a Wednesday, you'd have to write this in manually in a note to that timeline reference. Otherwise, Aeon is a powerful piece of kit.

Evening Mike , Late on Parade again

Hi Michael, did you eventually write the two books with the help of using this software or did you end up turning back to notebooks and scribbles to make sense of your timelines and characters? I'm considering purchasing it - I tried it a while ago as a demo - and I'm still not sure. Advice greatly appreciated. 😊

It’s so hard to see what you are doing. Zoom in. And why you are doing them. Hard to understand.