It’s pretty handy, and it has saved me a lot from getting stuck or blocked or distracted.

It is intentionally misspelled variant of “to come” so that it will be caught before publication.

I learned about this in a Columbia Journalism Review article, probably in the early 80′s, titled something like “There are ToKum Fact Checkers in the US”.

I hear so many good things about Scrivener, kind of wish I was a Mac user!!

If you do use in-text, for the love of Word do a thorough search later. (I’ve heard about a published book that had “Scene where X happens” still in it…)

Most of the time, though, I write [to here] to mark the spot where I stopped revising.

TK [clever closing comment to showcase my witty-ness]

See?

~Mary

I’m loving all the tips from both of you…keep them coming, and thanks for undertaking this!

Chapter 1

[rather a lot of stuff happens, most of it good and exciting]

The End

Happy Typing everyone!

Zeborah: You must hush! You’re pre-empting my next tip!

1) It means I write all the easy parts of the book first, meaning I have to write all the hard parts later in a single chunk, meaning I probably won’t finish the book. Whereas if I force myself to write entirely in order, I can use a future easy-and-fun scene as a reward for getting through a hard scene.

2) This always happens to me if I try it. Seriously, *always*. When I go back to write that scene in the nuclear reactor, Janice spots the strange man, prevents him setting the bomb, but discovers an even greater danger is afoot, and I have to scrap and rewrite absolutely everything that came after that now-obviated car explosion.

So I’ve stopped doing that.

I still use square brackets (or, rather, a black apple-shaped character that you can get on Macs by holding down shift-option-k — the advantage is that it stands out really well when you’re skimming) to signal minor gaps in research (eg “Change this fake Latin into real Latin!”, “Find out the name of a random Catholic nobleman in 1527 Copenhagen!”, and “Check the previous book for the location of that abandoned church!”) It doesn’t work so well for major gaps in research (“Read 134 digitised pages of manuscript 14th century Danish provincial law to find out the punishment for abducting and torturing a fellow nobleman!” — fortunately said manuscript turned out to have an index) because again, the difference between arresting the perpetrator or just fining him is going to make the plot go in wildly different directions.

Also I know people who can’t even use square brackets for character names, because for them changing the name changes the entire personality and thus the plot. Fortunately I don’t have that problem myself, and change character names all over the place whenever I discover that I’ve got 5 men called “Hans” and half a dozen other people with names beginning with “B”.

–But yeah, anyway. Not to deny the fact that, for those writers for whom it works, square brackets really are a godsend!