This story offers a somewhat more serious take on the superhero genre than my last story “Pinning Portugal”; and has more than a passing connection to the real world we actually live in.
I didn’t set out to explicitly write a YA story. It just happened that the protagonist is a high school sophomore. This is my first published story with such a young protagonist. Writing about younger characters is in some ways freeing, especially in speculative fiction, since they’re less likely to ask hard questions about the weird events happening around them. Intelligent adult characters in my stories have annoying habits of stopping and saying, “Wait a minute. How does that faster than light drive work exactly? And is it possible this whole thing is one colossal hoax?”