Every year or two I spend a few hours researching, find nothing good, and give up. I’ve been working on a sci-fi novel for many years, planning out the entire universe. The problem I run into is that there’s so many characters and groups and events that link together, that I can’t reference the material in one spot.
For example, I have a list of characters and their attributes and historical backstory they were involved with. What teams / families / allegiances / enemies they have.
I have a list of events that goes into detail of which characters are in them, how the characters change, etc
I have a list of places and in each place, I need to know which events occured, which characters were in each one, etc. There’s also discrete “pages” for teams, families, and other groupings of characters and places and events.
All of these different things link together. I want something like wiki software where I can be on a “Character Page” and have it contain dozens of hyperlinks to other characters, events, and places. So I can click on one of those links and jump to that page.
I also occasionally go to a local writing group, get some feedback on ideas, and document them as notes. I would like to retain those notes as discrete pages, such as “Notes from March 17th 2019” but also hyperlink to each thing, in both directions. So if I am looking on Character X page, I can see links to all 14 notes documents where she’s referenced. As you can tell this will be much harder if whatever system I use doesn’t automatically generate links, although I am open to manually doing it.
I don’t want to put this freely on the internet, so an online wiki system that isn’t encrypted won’t work for me, and in the past when I looked, that’s all I found for wikis.
I do have scrivener and use it, but it doesn’t feel right for this world building purpose. Is there anything out there that may work for me? Thank you in advance, my friends.
