Ever since Neverwhere, I've always pictured the main male characters in your stories as you. They all have black hair, they're all British, they tend to always wear black, and the way folks draw them as fanart almost always resembles you. Richard Mayhew is you. Bod is (little) you. The Narrator in OATEOTL is you. The Sandman... is you. Even Crowley is you. The only character who isn't, is Shadow. I can't be the only one who thinks this.
Except Richard Mayhew is meant to look like Gary Bakewell, who played him in the original Neverwhere TV show. (If a blond actor had got the role, he would have been blond, if a black actor had got it he would have been black.) This is Gary Bakewell as Richard:
I don’t think Bod is meant to be me as a kid. (He’s a light-haired baby whose hair darkens to mousey-coloured as he ages.)
Morpheus wasn’t meant to be me, given that he was drawn by Sam Kieth long before he met me or knew what I looked like, and his big hair wasn’t anything like what I looked like in 1988, although I gave him my fondness for black clothes.
Fat Charlie Nancy from Anansi Boys doesn’t look like me either.
The adult narrator of The Ocean at the End of the Lane isn’t me, but the seven year old protagonist is definitely intended to be me.
Crowley’s only physical description is
Crowley had dark hair and good cheekbones and he was wearingsnakeskin shoes, or at least presumably he was wearing shoes, andhe could do really weird things with his tongue. And, whenever heforgot himself, he had a tendency to hiss.
Mostly he had dark hair because Aziraphale, as his opposite number, was going to be fair of hair (although I suspect that if Crowley had been the blond one, you might be pointing to dark-haired Aziraphale as the self-portrait).
There’s some of me in all of the characters I write, good and bad, male and female. There has to be: that’s how we, as writers, make characters live. We find the bits that are us in them, the bits that are them in us.
But picturing all the male characters as me might lead you into odd places (including failing to notice that Fat Charlie is African-Caribbean, for example).
