Coloring within the lines

I'm putting the finishing touches on a rough draft for a new story, and as tends to happen to me, the story doesn't quite fit where it's supposed to. For those of you who aren't familiar with my work, I am generally categorized as a soft science fiction writer. The central issues in my stories are usually psychology, sociology, economics, politics, etc. Of course, a lot of times my work is very hard to categorize.

I had one piece called Entropy which was written as a mainstream/literary story, and I had no luck with it. Since it involved a guy going crazy about the concept of entropy, I figured I could make a few minor changes to it and turn it in to a science fiction story...so I did. The story was rejected over and over again for not having enough elements of science fiction. Finally, the story was sold, and it has been published.

I use that example because I just write whatever comes to mind, not worrying about genre...and then have a bitch of a time selling some of those stories.

This new story falls into that category. This is a hard SF piece, which isn't that strange, except that I used psychology as the hard science. I've basically theorized that psychology has been quantified, and my main character is a quantitative psychologist. That right there will probably get it rejected by some editors for not being real hard science. But, hey, that's how the story wanted to be written, and that's how it's been written. I'm not the first to come up with this idea. Asimov's psychohistory is kind of a quantification of psychology, although I would argue that it's more of a sociology...but that's just apples and oranges. Point is, I haven't invented the wheel, but I certainly seem intent on making things difficult for myself...

The story will probably be done in a couple of weeks, and then off it goes...