#young protagonists

[angel-ant-the-alien]

Olivia Strawberry

First request by @miss-fireberry. Hope you like her :)

Got really excited when people responded to my post for free requests!

Olivia is a young girl who has gone through hardship, but managed to stay strong.

[thefangirldiariesofatotalweirdo]

Character: *is sixteen* Me: They're The Age.

[geekquality]

Signal boost! Call for paid submissions for a publication coming in 2016! Deadline is April 30, 2015.

Crossed Genres will publish Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (expected release January 2016). This will be a follow up publication to Long Hidden (2014), a speculative fiction anthology containing "stories from the margins of speculative history, each taking place between 1400 and the early 1900s and putting a speculative twist—an element of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the unclassifiably strange—on real past events."

In Hidden Youth, the editors aim to take a similar approach to combating the erasure of voices in speculative fiction, but with a more specific focus: all submissions must take place before 1935 C.E., without exception, and the protagonists must be young people (under the age of 18) who were marginalized in their time. 

Full submission guidelines at the link above.

[fwriction]

From Edan Lepucki, whose debut novella, If You’re Not Yet Like Me, is out now from Flatmancrooked and available here, comes a great look at the appeal of the young protagonist:

Teenagers have a real drive to be independent, to discover and define (or defy) their identities. And yet, they’re also powerless. They have their parents’ will to contend with, and their friends’ complicated codes of behavior. They have the secret shames of the body. They long for the purity and ease of childhood even as they fling themselves into the dangers of adulthood. In short, they make for compelling characters.