Write for your heart, not the market

I've been working my way through a science fiction book I bought as my Christmas treat reading, and I'm not enjoying it.  I felt excited when I first saw this book in the shops, because it's written by a woman, a new author, and she uses her full name on the cover.  Hooray!  But my joy was short-lived when I started reading the book.

Yes, her main character is female, but she might as well be male.  She has no female attributes at all. She shows no emotions, and coldly describes the way she shoots four people.  Hmm.  Maybe we still have a way to go before real women with their more collaborative way of seeing the world get into the pages of SF novels.

It threw me back into the old despair of wondering if I'll ever have my female-centred SF appreciated  by a publisher.  For women writing SF, there's always the issue of toughening-up our female characters.  In many books they're warriors, or have some other ladette occupation.  My characters aren't like that.  In the Panthera books, Ren is a wildlife conservationist saving big cats who just happens to find herself in danger as a result of her work. In Eyemind, Keri is an artist investigating installation artworks, and again is drawn into danger as a side-effect.

I want to write about the quiet powerful, professional women who are making a difference to the universe not by wielding a sword, but by working away quietly at something in the background. After all, that's the way the real world works.  All the great discoveries are made by people quietly working away for years at something.

So, what do I do to increase my chances of commercial publication?  Do I write for the market and invent some kick-ass heroine I don't believe in?  Or do I stick to my guns and write the quietly powerful characters I love?  

A few years ago the answer would have been write for the market.  But now things are different.  If the mainstream publishing world doesn't like my heroines then I can always self-publish and build a readership that way.  I'm tough, and have lived through a lot of crap, but in a quiet way.  I survived and thrived in difficult situations, and that's what my heroines do.  

So I've decided to follow my heart and write the characters I believe in, and hang the publishers if they don't like it.