Synopsis: Something Awesome About Magic School Time Travel Goodness, Yes

Summary:
Magic is real, and totally screws with your life, particularly if you happened to live in Singapore, Los Angeles, Chicago, or one of about two dozen other cities totally obliterated in the magic war of 2025. Also, particularly if you're giving birth, which in one notable case resulted in a chaotic burst of magic hurling a handful of teenagers going back in time to before the war, where they are stuck with a baby, a potential traitor in their midst, a very confusing biography, and just fifteen years to save millions of lives and a world they're not really sure they like very much now that they've seen it for themselves.

Discussion:
My novel is going to be about kids from a messed-up future who accidentally go back in time (technically, they move into a parallel world at an earlier point than where they left, because my respect for Time Travel Logic is bigger than my respect for the Laws of Physics) to a point before things really started going south, and have to try and save the world and correct the mistakes they make along the way, including turning a bunch of people they used to know, into evil people. And one of them ends out marrying her mother's high school teacher, because you can't not have that happen in a school-story-they-go-back-thirty-years plot.

I'm being very bold this year, as an attempt to avoid getting stuck and not ever finishing, by skipping the five years of build-up in the old timeline before they jump back. I figure if I finish the book, I can write a prequel. It's the equivalent of starting Harry Potter at the moment he shows up at the Tri-Wizard Tournament holding the Cup and Cedric Diggory's corpse: lots of other stuff happened before, but it's the stuff after that you need to have straight first. The goal is to avoid a Lamentable Epilogue and randomly killing off beloved characters out of a misguided need for literary balance.

And yes, I am bitter.