I don't think I'm really that dark aside from my sense of humor. I just have a taste for angsty, broody men. 

I always end up writing for the darkest male character I can find.  I don't try to, it's just who ends up fitting the best.  For example, the character I've been writing for the past few days is one of those people that a lot of days gets up and wonders why he heck he doesn't just climb to the top of a tall building and jump.  There's plenty of other characters I could be writing for but he's just the most interesting. *shrug*   

You're not alone, I'm the same way.  If I try to write a whole freaking new world my writing has a tendency to be very choppy and the dialogue, normally the easiest part for me, sounds forced.  It's like you said, it takes more brain power, more forethought and planning, and I'm just at the stage in my writing I don't want to have to plan the ancestry of this character, where they live, where they're from, what their social status is, before I get to what the character IS and what the story is going to do because of them.  I just want to sit down, snap into that state of mind, and write until I'm done. 

However, that said, it's not exactly easy as pie to write urban fantasy either, even though it's probably just more general writing stuff that is hard instead of genre specific stuff.  For example, I don't have to really set up a whole different place for my character Jake to live, but because he is my main character and I'm telling the story through his eyes, I still have to sit back and try to get into a whole different headspace than what I'm normally in.  And it's not just that he's in a different stage of his life than I am (he's in his mid twenties or so, I'm a bit younger, still in the student stage of my life, while he's transitioning to the teaching portion of his life) but men just talk differently than women do.  They use different adjectives, different nouns, they use shorter sentences with fewer add ons.  In my experience, they say what they mean, then shut up.  I'm a girl, a tomboy, but still a girl, and I have to literally read back through my writing and go, "Arrggg, that sentence has two X chromosomes!!! *Growls at the second X* Y, Damn you, turn into a Y!  *Shuffles some nouns and verbs around*" 

So yeah, writing close to home is easier in some ways, but you have to focus much more on detail and I think that because the world is more familiar, readers are going to be less forgiving of inconsistancies and mistakes.  Without a whole new world to be awed by, it's easier to pick up characters acting weird and the sentences just aren't flowing and meshing the way they should.

I don't know how much of what I read really qualifies as fantasy, but most of the stuff I trip across with vampires either paints them as seduction machines or angsty seduction machines.  I personally love vampires and would really, really love to write something centering around them, but I think right now people are getting sick of them.  That really saddens me, because I don't like seeing them as just pretty sex machines, or just anything for that matter.  It makes them so dull, and there's just so damn much potential for making them into interesting, facinating people who are incredibly sexy because of how interesting and deep they are, which is far hotter than just being a seduction machine.  But maybe I'm romanticizing it all far too much... 

I've wanted to write a book and be an author for a long time, and recently I put together the beginnings of a book.  I don't know how it's going to end yet or even if it will be half decent when I'm through, but I'm trying!   

It's about magic and wizards and all that jazz, since that's what I've been reading and in the mood for lately, but in the world I have the wizarding world is a kind of altered reflection of our world with its own set of rules and customs.  All that exist are wizards and archangels.  Vampires used to be running about, but they've been exterminated and the only traces left of them are various families that have vampire in their bloodlines. It's being written in first person from a wizard prodigy named Jacob Bowen, who is preparing to take on his first apprentice at the beginning of the book.

My wizards are strange because I don't see them as doing magic in the traditional wave a wand and a teacup turns into a cat sense. They can rearrange molecules, protons, quarks, all the building blocks of matter, but they can't change the particles themselves, just what they combine to make, and they cannot create or destroy matter.  I suppose they're more alchemists than wizards, in that sense.  This is my first totally original work, so I'm just trying to watch and see where it goes.
 

Thanks for all the advice.  It's a big help, especially the examples.  ^_^

Now, off to edit some of my stuff, using my new knowledge. 

  Frell is one of my favorite words, even though I didn't really watch Farscape all that much.  I love the word forsooth as well, even though I never have a place to use it. But my favorite word of all time, in any language?

Pamplemousse.  It's French for grapefruit. 

I'm one of those people that has signed up, but never actually managed to do the challenge. *Sweatdrop* I'm going to this year, though!  Thanks for mentioning the screenplay thing they've got going this year... I never would have known about it otherwise. I writing screenplays is actually easier for me, mostly because I love dialogue and listening to people talk, but I can't figure out how to describe what the characters are doing as they speak.  I see everything going on in this perfect movie in my head, and it's hard to describe how someone's pacing around the room without having adverbs all over the place.