One of the "themes" of the story I'm working on is maintaining your sense of self through trauma. I've done two other very short stories in this series (30K words each) from human POVs and it's worked very well. However, the third story is from an alien POV and I'm hitting trouble.
One thing I thought would be interesting was to explore how well a person could maintain his sense of self when he and the other people around him are psychics. The alien race I'm playing with are psychic and can read their own species's minds pretty much thought for thought, unless the other psychic is really good at sheilding, and not thinking about pink elephants (aka whatever it is he's trying to hide). It's a race where identity itself is something you earn. They start off with no name and have to earn everything from pay to name to position in society through their deeds. They can also read human emotions (more specifically, the chemical reactions that feed human emotions) so while they can't read your mind and know you're about to shoot them, they can pick up on the emotional spike right before you turn to fire, and are fast enough to shoot you first.
A side effect of this is...I'm head-hopping. A lot. I know some of it is going away during the future edits, but some of it is going to be a part of the story. The bounderies between individuals here are blurred, and the climax is going to be this alien character finally finding a way to balance himself and (more or less) stop invading the other person's head every three seconds.
Given this (probably really confusing) bit of info...how much head-hopping would be acceptable? And is there any advice for how to make this less confusing?
One thing I thought would be interesting was to explore how well a person could maintain his sense of self when he and the other people around him are psychics. The alien race I'm playing with are psychic and can read their own species's minds pretty much thought for thought, unless the other psychic is really good at sheilding, and not thinking about pink elephants (aka whatever it is he's trying to hide). It's a race where identity itself is something you earn. They start off with no name and have to earn everything from pay to name to position in society through their deeds. They can also read human emotions (more specifically, the chemical reactions that feed human emotions) so while they can't read your mind and know you're about to shoot them, they can pick up on the emotional spike right before you turn to fire, and are fast enough to shoot you first.
A side effect of this is...I'm head-hopping. A lot. I know some of it is going away during the future edits, but some of it is going to be a part of the story. The bounderies between individuals here are blurred, and the climax is going to be this alien character finally finding a way to balance himself and (more or less) stop invading the other person's head every three seconds.
Given this (probably really confusing) bit of info...how much head-hopping would be acceptable? And is there any advice for how to make this less confusing?
