Oddly, I have a harder time writing characters of my gender than those of the opposite sex. I was once told I had a lot of "masculine energy." I guess so because I often relate to and write some powerful, sexy and complex male characters. I do think the biggest challenges is not letting my male characters sound like me. My male characters are alphas. They don't mesh words, so it's hard to keep them from being too chatty like me.
I do read book reviews. Nothing feels as good as seeing that something I wrote resonated with readers. Honestly, I am not the greatest at dealing with bad reviews, and when I read them, it almost killed my creativity. It took a lot of coffee and coaxing from a fantastic group of friends to hit the keyboard again. Now, I leave bad reviews alone. I have too many characters clamoring to get out of my head to have anything hinder my writing.