Hello YA Outside the Liners, and welcome to December. This month we’re mulling the idea of time traveling back to our teenage years and meeting our younger self – would you do it if you could?

My answer is a very cautious yes.

I’ve loved the time travel genre since watching the cheesy fun TV show “The Time Tunnel” as a kid. No surprise I’d put my time travel love into my writing, including the Beryl Blue, Time Cop series, with feisty, modern-day librarian Beryl Blue recruited to stop bad guys from messing with the timeline.

In Beryl’s world, there is one finite rule of time travel: you cannot change the past. Well, there are two basic rules, the second being don’t kill your own grandpa. I mean, the way fate and destiny work in the time travel business, chances are good you’ll run into an ancestor who’s pretty important to the future, particularly yours. All nascent time travelers learn, if they don’t want to wink themselves out of existence, they must keep sharp and don’t accidentally drop an anvil on Grandpa’s head.

But it’s the first rule of Time Travel Club that’s the most important. The past is fixed and can’t be changed, no matter how much you might want to. And Beryl Blue sure wants to – she’s lost everyone she’s ever loved, and a trip to past offers a chance to fix that. Glo Reid, the secretive time cop who sends Beryl on her temporal adventure to 1943 in the first book in the series, quite bluntly explains why that’s impossible:

Glo looked me straight in the eye. “Beryl, history can’t be changed. If you make one small change, it causes ripples that turn into waves that end up impacting every moment of time from that point forward until…” She ground her teeth. “Chaos is a mild way to describe it.”

So, with avoiding both chaos and killing my own grandpa in mind, I’ll step into my way back machine, journey to the 1970s and say hello to young me. I’d be sorely tempted to drop pearls of wisdom from the future – don’t worry so much what people think of you (or me, rather), fret less about my body, respect my parents, hug my siblings, and for the love of Fonzie and all that’s holy, do *not* buy that purple pantsuit. That kind of stuff. But that advice could mean a small change that could cause a ripple that turns into a wave, and so on, so I should probably keep my advice to myself.

And seriously, would young me pay any attention to older me anyway? Doubtful. Did I heed the advice given to me by someone older and wiser when I was a teen? No. I, like all teens, had to make my own mistakes, to live my life and gain that wisdom.

So instead of giving advice, I’d probably just hang out with young me. Go get a hot fudge sundae, go to the movies, see Star Wars again for the first time. Go shopping and steer younger me away from all pantsuits, purple or otherwise. And skip a visit with our grandpa, just in case.

Janet Raye Stevens writes smart, suspenseful, and stealthily romantic time travel, paranormal, and historical mystery fiction for all ages. Connect with Janet at janetrayestevens.com and check out Beryl Blue, Time Cop.