New year, new resolve

On New Year's Eve I always set my goals for the coming year.  Being a quiet introvert, I see no need to stay up to a late hour celebrating an artificial division in time. But the turn of the year is the time when we look to our future, and my time is well spent planning - and dreaming - about the future of my writing career.

So what have I planned for this coming year?  In one phrase, to get mainstream published. Yes, I know that was last year's resolution too.  So what's different about this year?  Several things.  The first is that in the last year I've done a lot of hard thinking about my author 'brand'.  Who am I as a writer, and what do I want to be remembered for?  That's now crystallised into a couple of pithy statements.

One half of my writing explores human use and misuse of the natural world and its creatures.  The other strand is about sentient artificial intelligences and how humans react to them.  In short, my work explores the way humans react to and treat 'the other'.

These interests and concerns have run through all my writing for over forty years.  But in the early days I didn't give a thought to USP, or causes.  I simply wrote the stories that came to me, the ones I fell in love with.  And that's how it should be.  Our passion will only come across in a story we love.

It was when I reviewed my submissions folder and took a good, hard, look at the novels sitting on my shelves that this clarity emerged. And with it has come a new resolve.  I'm done with wanting to write like my favourite bestselling authors.  I have my own voice now.  I know what it is, and it is the one I will use in all my writing from now on.  And it is this clarity that is fuelling my new resolve to get published.  But I don't want it to be at the cost of changing my beliefs and values, or of dumbing-down my voice.

So this year's goal is to be mainstream published as my individual self.  As a unique voice unlike any that has been before.  I've already made a start on this.  So far, Genehunter, the novel that reflects my ecology interests, has been sent to three agents and two publishers' open reading periods.  That's not a bad start for the second week in January.

My challenge will be to keep up that resolve for the rest of the year, in spite of the rejections and setbacks.  Here's hoping 2016 is the breakthrough year.