Character creation

My recent successes in Blender led me to a bit of overconfidence.  I'm trying to work out character creation, which is proving to be a much more difficult task.  First of all I know I need to create a skeleton before I even think of starting on the actual forming.  Getting this part done so far is beyond my level, and just messing around led to Blender crashing.  I might have to wait on this until I'm in school as well.