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Here are a few of my personal beliefs about Mary, again it's cool if you don't agree, but they give contexts to why I wrote things the way that I did. Also, if you want to skip this you totally can!
I think she was Joseph's first wife. When researching the origins of the idea that she was his second wife I learned that it stems from the idea that she was a virgin her whole life. This is how we can account for James the brother of Jesus. However, I don't personally believe she died a virgin and I do believe she had more children.
On a similar note, I don't believe Mary was biologically related to Jesus in any way, both the sperm and the egg came from God. However, she was still Jesus's mother and he honored her as such.
I did some research and I landed on Mary's age being 15 at Jesus's birth, you can do the math after that. My reasoning is that given her culture she would have been expected to marry shortly after she began menstruation. So, I looked into when that would be, and I found a paper which cited a few different ancient Greek writers which placed the age of menarche at around 14 years old. This of course varied from individual to individual, however if that was considered common then that's the age I'm going with.
I have written Joseph to be approximately the same age as Mary since his culture would have put a similar pressure for him to marry and start a family and the same Greek writers put down the same maturation age for boys as girls.
Also, some more general ones:
I believe the majority of the time angels appear to people they just look like regular guys. My favorite biblical example of this is when an angel appears to the parents of Sampson in the book of judges.
I don't feel the need to strictly parrot the dialogue from the Bible, but I will stick as close to the source material as possible.
If there are contradicting accounts, I will lean towards the account that best matches the story I want to tell. There's not much I can do about that, if they contradict, we just don't know which is literally/letter-of-the-law true so there really isn't a right answer.
I like to consult many different translations. some of my go-to ones are: Christain Standard Bible, King James Version, and Complete Jewish Bible.