I doubt I'll ever write a black or Asian character set in modern settings. I'd be afraid of getting the ethnic background/feel wrong. But I do like using ethnicity in my fantasy settings. Loved Him is about a black man, although he'd look more like a very dark Hawaiin.

Hmm, I think you can write ethnic characters with just as diverse of backgrounds as other people. Distributions of occurrance probably vary, due to economic, political, social, and cultural factors. For example, you can have upper class blacks who are just as priviledged as whites in this country, although statistically it's more rare. It might even be interesting to stand stereotypes on their heads and write a story like that.

The thing I find hard about it is that there's a cultural background which each ethnic group that is sometimes hard to capture. For example, Germans or Swedes: they're apparently very blunt and will tell you something is stupid right to your face if you do or say something stupid. And they don't mean anything bad by it, apparently. It's just a simple statement of fact. But you get a Canadian or American say that, you'd almost expect hurt feelings and raised hackles. It's stuff like that that makes me back off from writing a fictional character of another ethnicity set in a modern story. If I don't have sufficient info on that person's cultural way of thinking, I tend to avoid writing them. If I invent the culture, then I write them however I like.

I love writing ethnicities, and one theme that keeps on coming up for me is two cultures meeting, dealing with each other in the light of supposition and then finding the human being. It's true of almost everything I write-- Rock Star, Gorgeous Biker Babe, Scary Pirate-- all turn out to be real people under the trappings. And sometimes as well, it's interesting to have your main character have to deal with someone who doesn't want to see a real person there, but wants only the fantasy. My very first attempt as a long work-- the one that will never be completed, unless I go back and re-write an awful lot-- has a lot of black folk in it-- and white and Japanese and Hispanic. The main characters are a white woman, her boyfriend who is very light-skinned black, his cousin who is blue-black, her friend who becomes the cousin's Girlfriend-- who is Afro-Japanese American. There is talk amongst the men about Tracy's light color-- someone calls him "That ugly little yellow fucker" and "Chinee." His biggest issue is his Sensitive Artist Syndrome that renders him incapable of functioning every once in a while. The darker Tony gets ribbed that his dick must be huge. Karen gets hit with White Guilt every once in a while; in a scene with Tony she says that she can't atone for everything the white race has done; he complains that he doesn't care either, he's only trying to get her to give him the blowjob she's promised him... Angel, the AJA woman, is a Valley Girl first and foremost. One of Tracy's sisters is angry angry angry and hypersensitive to the race issue, and never accepts Karen as her brother's girlfriend.

I think my preferred fantasy would be a more diverse world not a more uniform one? I did a quick role call of my characters and found three nationalities and four ethnicities which isn't really much of a spread when editors are crying out for work that isn't the same ol' routine, historical periond, setting, mythology etc.

Oooh character roll calls. I've done that before. Not in a while though.