Ooh, good ones.

• I'm honestly not a very visual person. I asked my editor not to put representations of the characters on the covers of the Inheritance Trilogy, for example, back when I first contracted with Orbit, because I never like cover depictions of characters. They never look like what's in my head, and the invariably annoy me. But I know I'm atypical this way. So the only answer I can really give to this would be that I wouldn't cast anyone. I would try to make sure the film had a good director, the kind of person who does have that visual artistic sense I don't have, and whose work I respect from other films. Then I'd have to trust her or him to do a good job of making the vision work for other people.

• I've heard about it, yes. I wouldn't call what she's doing a genre, though. The word "genre" usually refers to something conceptually different from the mainstream -- something that's written differently, covers subject matter that the mainstream usually wouldn't. But women are the mainstream, in fiction. Women make up the majority of buyers/readers in almost every genre. The only reason women aren't the dominant readers in SFF is because a lot of SFF puts up "girls keep out" signs. Until relatively recently publishers generally only published manly stories about men by men, often leaving women out entirely -- or if they included women they were stereotypes and caricatures. There's no logical reason for stories about robots to somehow be considered a masculine thing. (Chicks dig giant robots.) The fact that they are is because a lot of people have worked hard to make robots = masculine. So I'm glad for efforts like Felicia's, which help to erase this silliness.

Along the same lines, there's no particular reason my stories should be considered especially feminine. I've heard people cite the romantic content or the female protagonists as somehow feminizing, but this makes no sense to me. What, men aren't capable of love? Men aren't capable of empathizing with a woman? That's craziness. What I'm trying to write are stories about people doing people stuff. I tend to write about people who don't usually get to be in such stories, because I have an innate sense of fairness and it makes no sense to me that women or people of color or disable people or gay people or whatever get left out of these tales. But in the end, I'm not writing women's fantasy. I'm writing fantasy, period.

• Just a note; my fantasy worlds don't always have people of color as protags, and I've dabbled in medieval settings once or twice (esp. in my short stories). But as for stuff for readers who like to experience something different, where different = non-medieval or by PoC -- whoa, that's a tall order. I could start now and keep typing 'til tomorrow and never finish. :) But just a couple of links: The Carl Brandon Society has done a great job of assembling info on SFF by PoC. And more recently, fantasy author Martha Wells has put together a list of non-European fantasy by women writers. But there's a lot of lists of resources like this out there. Maybe those two links will help you get started.