Meme - Day 2

2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?

It would take way too much effort to go back and count how many characters appear in each novel I've written. Brookline alone probably has hundreds, as I have an encyclopediac binder full of names I can use if I need to refer to a professor, student, sorority or fraternity member etc. There are 40 members of the sorority in the first book and that grows each year, so that series has easily hundreds of characters (although only a handful that get "screen time").

I can say that the majority of my characters are female. When I was younger and created most of these characters and worlds, I was more familiar with female POVs, so I had a substantial lack of male characters. I had never written a male POV until I tried to for a short section of Brookline. I broke out of the "female only" bracket when I wrote fan fiction, and now I can say I feel comfortable writing either, although I prefer female POVs because the research is a bit easier lol.

Overall, I probably have created a few hundred characters. As for characters with meaningful page time and affect on plot, probably 5-10 per novel, so I'd guess 50-100 different meaningful characters.