I've put off for too long responding to the second writer's blog prompt, which is on the subject of theme: what themes I see in my work, how intentional they are, and why I think they keep turning up. I had a devil of a time with it, and talking to the author of the prompts earlier today shook loose a thought I hadn't had.
Looking over my last few projects, I can see a few themes.
Violence is one of them. I write about a lot of violence. There's fight scenes everywhere. A huge chunk of that is genre - superheroes, thrillers about battling supernatural beings, that sort of thing. But even my poetry tends to be violent.
I'm not sure what this says about me. I'm not a particularly violent person in real life. Well, that's not true. I used to be, a million years ago in public school, but after I studied martial arts I calmed down a lot. Maybe I use writing the same way I use martial arts practice and meditation - to calm those impulses.
Sexuality is more of an issue in my fiction than you'd think, since I often gloss over it or leave it out, but it stands out to me as something I have to make myself think about in virtually every piece (and yes, obviously it comes up in my poetry a lot as well). I have to consciously think about the sexuality of my protagonists - otherwise I'd tend to have nothing but gay folks. Since I don't write gay erotica for a living, this does not necessarily always serve the story. I do, however, try to keep nonstandard sexualities in the picture, just like they are in real life, even if my protagonist is not gay.
I tend to write people who are kind of like me, but cooler. I think that's self-explanatory, really.