Allan Hudson asked Stephen P. Kiernan:

Hello. Your main characters are always female. I think it is difficult to do that and yet you do it so well. is there a reason you prefer female protagonists?

Stephen P. Kiernan This is a question I'm often asked, and I have yet to find a definitive answer -- because there are lots of reasons.
First, I think the realms of hero and antihero have been explored in depth for men, and many manifestations of these roles are new for women -- or at least, new for fiction. Emma in The Baker's Secret, for example, came to me with a richness of narrative possibilities that a male in the same circumstances would not have offered. Her unique kind of heroism made writing the book more of a discovery.
Second, there is the challenge of craft (that is, getting away with writing a gender other than my own). It requires me to compose with great care, and to listen closely to early readers (nearly all women) so I learn what the wrong notes may be.
Third, any character (and any narrative voice) is the result of an act of imagination. In The Curiosity, one of the narrators is a man born in 1870 -- an experience completely foreign to me. It's all invention.
The writer's task, it seems to me, is to create an experience that the reader can believe in, a voice and character and soul that will come to life in the reader's imagination. That challenge is the same regardless of whether I am writing in a woman's voice, or in first person for a character very much like myself.
I am well along in a new novel right now, and once again my central character is female (though I embarked on the idea thinking otherwise). She is strident, and smart, and entirely misguided, and that latter characteristic is far more challenging to me than her gender. If you saw today's rough draft pages, you would say she is beating me handily.
Wish me luck.
And thank you for the question.

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