I read the rules to creating the timeline and liked them. A thought ocurred as I read them: would the game work with a branching timeline? As the number of cards is the same, the story may be shorter, especially if the timeline branches a lot, but it could be interesting…
A storyteling game I do like is Universalis, where players create the story by paying coins and then can gain new coins by winning conflicts. A conflict is created when two players want to tell the current events differently, and is solved with dice. Each side gathers a dice for each element already present in the story that could help that event (these may be objects, characters that help, special abilities, etc…). Winning roll gets to tell what happens and gets a number of coins that can be spent in future turns. It creates a nice economy so players have a limit to what they can add to the story but also there's a nice way of recovering them, so conflicts are encouraged…