2 Comments

  1. Listened to this episode this morning. (Yes, I’m behind.)

    I was surprised that Dan didn’t mention the basic tricks that other authors use to drop notes into a manuscript for later revision.

    For instance, in Word or Scrivener, you can add comments to a section and leave notes for yourself about the changes needed.

    If you don’t like comments, some authors insert notes into the text directly like this [tk: add a brilliant example here]. The brackets help the notes stand out, and the TK opener makes the notes easy to find. If you’re writing in English. The letters T and K don’t naturally appear together in the English language. However, if you’re including foreign words or place names, you may need to be careful, as I discovered when writing The Perils of Prague, which contained references to the Czech monument on Vitkov Hill.

    Enjoying the podcast.

    Doc

    1. That kind of thing can trip people up. I especially liked this from Lawrence Miles, about a guide to Doctor Who he wrote:
      “Dunno if I’ve mentioned this before, but: whenever I’m writing a first draft, if I need to leave a space for extra research or an obvious rewrite, I always mark the passage with “xx”. Virtually no English words contain these letters in a pair, so it’s easy to find the paragraphs that need work using the “search” function. Which was fine… until I had to write about a race called the Exxilons, who live in the City of the Exxilons, on a planet called Exxilon. In story XXX.”

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