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What do you mean by that? I just finished Stardust and The Ocean At The End Of The Lane and his writing was quite lovely - but he was going for the fairy tale vibe with those books.

I really liked Neverwhere, The Graveyard Book, all his short story collections, Coraline...and Stardust is probably in my top 5 favorite movies (so much to where I'm scared to read the book). I'm not a big Sandman fan...it is just so dark.

Anathem, not Anathema.

Books I've liked recently that have done that sort of thing: Rainbows End, or if you're willing to venture a little further in genre then Stardust (by a different Neil).

Here is the grand total of formatting supported by RTF in use in my novels:

* headers

* italics

* maybe 2-3 instances of *bold* through the entire text.

I don't need any additional "quality of editing". Hiding the syntax is irrelevant because the needs are so limited. Hiding the user interface on the other hand, matters to me, because it's a distraction (to others it isn't). My editor color-codes the headers and the italics, and having it stand out matters far more to me than that it looks the way it will in the formatted book, because my draft looks nothing like the finished book will anyway.

If you look at interviews with writers, you'll find a whole lot of obsession over the process, and things like how it feels to write with a pen vs. a typewriter vs. a word processor, and very, very little about what their drafts look like. It's far down the list of considerations you'll find novelists care about.

Nobody cares what the drafts look like, because they are transient. In fact you'll find a whole lot of authors advocate avoiding going back and editing and arguing for things like dictaphones etc. to make going back harder or using tools that won't let scroll up in some cases to simulate the typewriter experience, and all kinds of similar obsessions with spending as little time as possible on formatting and what the manuscript looks like in preference of being able to just dump the first draft into text the fastest way possible (while other authors want writing the first draft to take longer on purpose - to some that is a reason for using pens or pencils).

You mentioned Gaiman in another reply - someone who has talked at length about how since he wrote Stardust in a fountain pen he has come to enjoy being forced to rewrite his second draft entirely instead of being able to go back and forth and editing it since he switched to writing with pen on paper.

I'm sure you can find novelists that want to see a beautifully formatted manuscript while writing it. They have tools they can use.

But to suggest Markdown is some sort of big hindrance compared to some of the barriers novelists create for themselves on purpose doesn't pass the smell test for me.

... which, in turn, resists the gravity (iirc?) i.e. supernovas are formed when this balance collapses and a series of fission/fusion reactions fail to stabalise the star. This helps create heavy elements, as the star explodes and some magnificent forces are unleashed, seeding the surrounding space with the necessary stuff for "further development" - later stage stars, planets, coments/asteroids and life.

I highly recommend Stardust by John Gribbin for a thorough and accessible read on the subject of stars and their evolution.

I remember reading about a theory expounded upon in the last chapter of Stardust (by John Gribbin), where he claims it's possible (although he urges you to think of it as a thought experiment) that Universes are born from black holes and that if that were so, there would be a sort of evolutionary pressure that would lead to Universes becoming better at creating black holes. This, in essence, explains away the curiously specific and precise numbers that are the foundations of our universe. They have evolved to support matter and energy in the form we are accustomed to seeing it, because that is the most conducive to the birth of black holes and baby universes.....

/me takes it all with a pinch and a half of salt

I remember reading about a theory expounded upon in the last chapter of Stardust (by John Gribbin), where he claims it's possible (although he urges you to think of it as a thought experiment) that Universes are born from black holes and that if that were so, there would be a sort of evolutionary pressure that would lead to Universes becoming better at creating black holes. This, in essence, explains away the curiously specific and precise numbers that are the foundations of our universe. They have evolved to support matter and energy in the form we are accustomed to seeing it, because that is the most conducive to the birth of black holes and baby universes.....

/me takes it all with a pinch and a half of salt