What is my natural writing voice?

I'm still struggling with my next writing project. Actually, that's not exactly true: I'm not struggling with my next project because I haven't yet decided what my next project should be; I'm struggling to decide on a next project.


I have completed drafts of the four stories that will form part of the next Abigail story book and, if I might blow my own horn for a moment, I think they're really good. There's action, a little bit of comedy and quite a bit of character development in them. And I didn't struggle at all in getting them written. As with the original 12 stories, they really just poured out of my fingers and onto the computer screen.


But what next? My partner tells me that I should stop struggling to write mysteries and court-room dramas (the two genres I thought were my thing) because, in her opinion at least, they don't represent my "natural voice". Based on how smoothly the Abigail stories seem to flow out me, she argues, my "natural voice" must be in the genre of middle-school or young-adult fiction -- more specifically, the voice of an innocent, somewhat naiive and optimistic young girl who isn't afraid to take on life's bigger challenges.


Yes, you read that right: my natural voice is apparently that of an adolescent girl, preferably one who lives in the middle part of the 20th century.


Is my partner right? Is that really my natural voice?


I am having a hard time arguing with her, to be honest. The Abigail stories flow so remarkably smoothly for me. I can generally produce a very strong draft of a story in perhaps two hours of writing and that draft will require very little editing or revising to get it into final form.


That being said, I find it something of a bewildering situation. I have spent my entire life thinking that mysteries were my genre and, almost from the start, my protagonist was going to be a lawyer turned investigator, so that I could incorporate elements of courtroom drama into the mix. I have, in fact, completed three novel manuscripts in the mystery genre and have come very close to having two of them picked up by mid-sized Canadian publishers.


I have also written five or more short stories in the same genre, though none of those have caught on either.


What I keep having to accept is the fact that the writing process for every one of those particular pieces (novel and short story alike) was a fairly tortured, drawn out experience. They were really hard for me to write. The final product was good but the process was painful.


So maybe I should take these Abigail stories, and the ease and pleasure with which I wrote them, as confirmation that I've been wrong for most of my writing life, that I really should be writing middle-school or YA fiction.


I had thought my next project would be to go back to my mysteries and revise them some more with a view to resubmitting them to new publishers. But maybe, just maybe, I should be planning a full-length book for young people, with a female protagonist.


It's the decision of what to write next, rather than the writing itself, that is currently bogging me down.