Thanks for the good advice. I do the bracket thing sometimes--it saves my editors time shooting down bad ideas. ;)

I don't know if this would be helpful to you at all, but sometimes when I have a beginning and then a handful of scenes that happen later on, I write everything I've got in my mind. Then I go and fill in the blanks; should a character's personality have changed from what I first wrote, then I rewrite the scenes I've already done. Mostly, it just helps me to see where I want the story to go.