Is telepathic formatting an auto-rejection?

pezerp59 said:

If I'm following correctly and the Hive mind is different voices. It might be helpful to assign character traits to the voices.

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A good example of that: CJ Cherryh, Voyager in Night. The ship characters are basically "the hive mind" and "various independents" which all have individual character traits.

Eh, whether you believe your book is going to be a "hit" or not, it's not the best idea to talk down to the entire genre you're actually writing in.

No matter how good a book is the author usually has little say over where it's shelved.
Game of Thrones was only categorised as 'Fantasy' when I read it ten years ago. Now I see it mixed in with mainstream novels all the time. The only thing that changed was media exposure.
So, if you write a science fantasy, it's probably going to be put in the sc-fi section

I didn't read all of the thread, but Peter Hamilton did something with a hive mind in his book Pandora's Star. Granted, it wasn't in the first chapter and was worked in later on, but he did it very well. I think the thing he did that you didn't was to mix in more around the dialogue, more scene/action description, which made it very easy to follow. I think you could take a look at his method and see how it might end up being clearer.

(Personally, I've never tried to write a hive mind, because it seems like it would be a lot to keep track of. But it can work well.)

AbbyBabble said:

But none of those were hits.

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???!!!!

Say what?

!!!???

You think that selling 100,000+ copies and winning major awards isn't a hit? What the foo is a "hit" then?

AbbyBabble said:

But none of those were hits. None are visible to the general reading public. If I was an agent looking for the Next Big Thing, and I believed I was getting something along the lines of a C.J. Cherryh or Vernor Vinge novel, I would pass on it, too.

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I think I put some cards down on a table recently. I shall add to them. I don't know why. Maybe it's just because I have some writing to avoid.

Someone out there somewhere probably is writing the Next Big Thing, the Science Fiction (SF) novel that's going to crack the genre wide open, raise it from its heading-for-moribund state and even maybe get noticed by a few people outside of SFFdom (although I wouldn't bet on THAT). Thing is, that person doesn't know they're writing that novel. They're just writing a novel.

If you want to reach the general reading public (whoever they are--women reading Romance? women and a few men reading Dan Brown? Iain -M Banks?) then SF is not the place. It's a niche genre that's somewhat looked down upon. It has, what? 10% of the market share?

The authors you sneer at for being successful are hugely so within SF. The idea that you're going to be the one to break out and make SF hugely popular outside its niche...well, maybe you are. But your writing doesn't yet back your play.

If CJ Cherryh is an under-achiever, sign me up for some of that. I dream of being so "unsuccessful".

mirandashell said:

ETA: I get what you're saying, Will,.

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Me too, but I like it as it is and think it could work.