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With the exception of Jericho and Nathan, sex really isn't a focus for most of my characters. Seeing that Yinda's only fourteen, Sabine has had a Proper Upbringing, and Vitae just never had time for relationships...well, yeah, as far as I know all three are virgins.

Jericho had an affair with some guy's wife and wound up in prison when all was said and done, but I'm still finding a place to mention that in the story.

And then there's Nathan, who I'm currently having a heated argument with over whether I ought to make it blatantly obvious that he likes men, or if I should just let his actions speak loudly enough that I don't have to go out of my way to draw attention to it. Or if his actions should speak loudly at all. I never set out for this story to be about sex--but then Nathan happened.

The really tragic thing is that Nathan only really has one role model (when it comes to sexuality) from the things I read and that would be Felix Harrowgate from the Doctrine of Labyrinths series. Like I said, tragic. The last thing this world needs is another Felix. Prior to Felix he took most of his cues from DWJ's various frou-frous--Howl, Corcoran, Torquil, etc.--and none of those cues had anything to do with sex. I'm thinking I'll have to start steering him back in that direction.

Nathan is the cause of much worry and panic on my part, because I feel like I really just don't know how to present him. This goes along with my current desperate urge to lock myself away for six months with a stack of books dealing with various topics and issues and read until my mind explodes, or, on the off chance, I actually learn something.

At the moment, my personal views on sexuality can be summarized as Asdfghkjlk, and are neatly filed under the topic of Do We Actually Exist?, which has a nasty habit of making messes all over the desk in English class. Er... "Cultural Studies, but We Aren't Calling it That Yet" class. The messes tend to include my (pulverized or otherwise now-liquid) brains. So there you have it. Bloody post-modernism.

I tend to represent my characters' interests as percentages out of a hundred in preference for and the male/female gender. Gender, not sex, as in Ysabell's Story World, it's all (or at least, mostly) cultural. Sort of. Possibly. Actually, hell if I know. If everyone in the world were clumped together and their point on such a scale graphed, the graph is assumed to appear bimodal around 20 and 80, and that true 100's do not really exist. They all pursue said preferences to different degrees, again represented as a percentage out of 100.

These values can be influenced by situation, such as brainwashing, trauma, etc. but are generally based on some internal, not-so-frequently acted upon... something, rather than on actions. There's also what they consider themselves/are considered by the worlds they live in, which also influences their actions.

Thusly: (note that the first is male/female, not same/opposite, or some such, and the preference in parenthesis is what they consider themselves/are considered, not necessarily how I would label them)

Kita (her father's. Not as creepy as it sounds.): 80/20, 10%
Feragel (straight): 10/90, 40% (he's got other reasons)
Indio (gay): 85/15, 60% (FYI, the later is about "normal"- Kita and Feragel are freaks)
Elia (underage): SHE'S A LITTLE GIRL, YOU PERVERTS. Ahem.
Adele (.....): 5/95, 0% (he's... damaged, and the Power of Love ain't gonna do s**t)
Hero: No idea. He... doesn't really turn up much, just some brainwashed... brainwash he was more or less programed/replaced with.

Alex (......): 60/40, 20%
Connor (too young): 25/75, 60% (if her were an adult)
Zaya (bi): 60/40, 70%
Armaranth (female preference): 30/70, 50%

In my current story (that I need to write in more), my characters have no sexual feelings. This is probably because their sexual preferences aren't important to the story, and since it's a mini-novel, such things would not add to the story, which is crammed full of plot and characters enough as it is.

Sex happens in my stories because sex happens in real life, but my characters are sexual for different reasons.
Asha (an fallen angel) wound up falling in love with a Demon...who took her to bed. Now don't be angry with her, she didn't understand what was happening. But in the climax of the story their love and sexual relationship has real import, because it gives them a child. A child of both worlds.
Many of my characters are sexual, but almost against their will. Amanda, for example, was molested by her father at a young age. That memory plagues her, but not because she wants it to. But because of that memory, sex has an influence over her life.
I include love making in my stories a lot, but its almost a metaphor for me. When I think about sex, I think about love and wholeness. When two of my characters come together like that (Hecate and Akio for example) it's almost more of a symbolizing of the fact that finally they will be whole and not broken anymore. Yeah, I'm wierd like that.

Oh, I understand that completely! Like I said, I've written about characters who were molested. I've written about their torment and their anguish about what happened to them. Even Asha was tormented with her actions at first, she's a holy creature after all. It just happens to be a trend in what I write that sex winds up being slightly healing for them. I have other stories, other characters who are forced to do terrible sexual things to demean themselves and prove the superiority of others. But as terrible as the act is, it winds up empowering them to do amazing things later on. I wasn't meaning to lecture on sex in general or in real life. Simply how I have used in my writing. I think I've dabbled a little on both sides of the extreme myself. Sex as a weapon and sex as a tool for healing.

In the happy little land in my head, pretty much everybody is bisexual and loves each other equally for various different reasons at various different times. Of course, that's not how things really are, and I constantly struggle to make straight characters. I compensate for this, however, by shipping my own characters on the side when nobody is looking >.>

I grew up with a ton of sexually charged friends who have been on about it since I was like, five year old, so its kind of ingrained in me as being a big part of who characters are. I, on the other hand, was never very interested personally, (I don't like people touching me) but its still somehow a big part of my thinking. Could just be hormones, idk.

Sexuality rarely figures into my plots (which I am HORRIBLE at anyway, so they're rarely cohesive as it is) but it does, big time, into the characters. I have a lot of conflict with this, because I know that you can't write a good story by just rambling on, but my characters tend to wonder off in all directions at odd times >: They tend to do this in the interest of perusing dead-end relationships that I never condoned, but am usually fascinated by anyway. Probably because I end up torturing them endlessly with their repressed/forbidden/kidnapped love or whatever the hell I fell like at the time, and because sexuality makes characters so damn vulnerable, its so WONDERFUL to exploit in terrible, terrible, terrible ways.

Most of my characters have/have had some sort of sexual relationship, but I rarely elaborate on any sort of details. Romance/pornography is not my forte. I use heterosexual and homosexual and male and female characters with about equal frequency.