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@morreafirebird

That’s definitely something I’ve struggled with. My three main WIPs at the moment all feature female characters and it was difficult for me to decide how to deal with them. One WIP is a dystopian, featuring a revolution, of course. I decided that one of my girls would be in the revolution (since historically, women make up a lot of rebellions) but would be acting with one of the guys as a first aid, medic person, and that the other girl (who is also a mother, so I wanted to keep her out of the main action) would be a message runner/spy sort of person.

My second WIP is historical and set in WW1. I’ve usually seen WW1 books focusing on guys, because obviously staying home or being a nurse were too boring (how ridiculous), but I decided to have a majority of female characters anyway. The way I got around it was by deciding to focus on aspects of the war that are usually overlooked. For example, one girl is an Aboriginal and applies to become a nurse, so a lot of her plotline is about the difficulties of that. Another girl is German and is taken to an internment camp, which has a lot of political strife going on in it. My final girl I haven’t quite decided on yet, but she’s working in some sort of army position on the homefront.

My final WIP, a fantasy, also has a female MC. In this, she’s also a warrior/survivor type, but she’s hired as a tutor to the foreign queen, who has recently married the king, in order to teach her their language. This WIP does have some fighting in it, and Yilla (the MC) often defends both the king and queen, but I feel like I did a fairly good job at balancing her femininity with the fact that sometimes she filled a need for someone else’s protection, if that makes sense. She’s kept in the plot because she slowly grows from her position as tutor to the queen to advisor to the king, and she’s also much more savvy and worldwise than the monarchs are, which means she’s always the first one to know about the assassination attempts and all the brewing political strife, and she’s often the one working out solutions to problems and such.

So, I don’t know if that’s useful at all, but those are some of the ways I’ve managed to do it.