nrjxll does a 30-day writing meme

This was linked in Writer's Block Daily recently, and I found it an interesting enough idea to give it a try. Since I don't have a blog or anything like that, I've decided to post my responses here, one day at a time.

Day 01 → Your favorite writ­ing project/universe that you’ve worked with.

In general, I'm not very good at picking a singular "favorite" for anything, and in some of the other cases where a question like this comes up, I'll probably do something a little tangential rather then try and come up with a specific answer. However, in this case, I do have a clear answer: the universe of my unnamed comics that I've discussed a fair bit on here.

I've always found that fact a little interesting, because while I'm willing to adjust the plot of a story as I work on it, the setting of a project is something I like to plan out in advance. That's not what happened in my comics: they pretty much evolved as I wrote them, incorporating whatever I found most interesting at the time. Although I made a specific effort to maintain continuity, the universe was sufficiently disjointed that I'm using Broad Strokes for it in my current project, a webcomic 'spinoff' set 400 years in the future.

It's not easy to tell what it was I found so appealing about these comics that I worked on them for eight years and ultimately wrapped everything up, in contrast to the dozen or so projects that I abandoned with little work ever done. I don't think it was because of their unplanned nature; while I find studying how they evolved interesting, I still prefer preplanned works. Ultimately, I think it's a combination of versatility and familiarity. The Genre Roulette setting let me do a takeoff on whatever ideas I found most interesting at any given time, and working in that setting for so long made me much more invested in it than in any new project I came up with.

Day 02 → How many char­ac­ters do you have? Do you pre­fer males or females?

To put it briefly: Only God knows and yes.

To put it more fully: I am a big believer in trying to have a realistic cast size whenever possible. The only cases where The Main Characters Do Everything and the like are defensible is when having a more realistically-sized cast would actually cost you, as in television. Since I work in one-person mediums (literature and sequential art), I can be as free with cast sizes as I want. This is not to say that I try and have large numbers of major characters, however. It's important to realize that not every character needs to be fully developed - focusing specifically on the characters important to the story while having a large number of minor characters around them creates much more verisimilitude without requiring the audience to focus on any more characters than the traditional small cast does. By that definition of "number of characters", then, I have maybe three dozen or so in my (long, serialized) current project, counting major villains.

As for the issue of whether I prefer to write male or female characters, I honestly don't see much of a difference. I generally don't write fiction set in the sort of societies where there would be reason to write characters as significantly different based on their sex, and even when I do, I don't think I can say which I "prefer" to write any more than I can say whether I "prefer" to write, say, military officers or vagrants.

...that didn't last long.

I caught a cold.