By Russ Colchamiro

As with all great stories, Crossline was inspired by — what else — a girl.

I’ll explain.

Crossline is actually the melding of two completely disparate ideas I developed a dozen years apart. Back in the late ‘90s, I had an idea for a sci-fi comic book mini-series. A buddy of mine helped me see how big Crossline could really be, so I upped the action and then we put the very beginning of Crossline into layout. But the comic book never took off, so to speak.

Yeah. Okay, great. But … what’s this about a girl?

Well … back in high school I had a crush on a redhead, who was a tried and true American Irish lass who also happened to be fiery and passionate about all things Ireland and the IRA. So of course I had to write about it, because who better to capture ‘the troubles’ then a 16-year-old Jewish kid from Long Island who knew absolutely nothing about Ireland?

And so a trilogy of short stories came to be. They were lumpy and unpolished, but there was a real cross-border love story set within political action and intrigue, and each story was an improvement over the last. The framework for something special was in place.

(For the record, I never published the stories, and to my chagrin at the time, I never got the girl.)

And yet … I held onto the story idea, and when at long last I saw how the sci-fi component could really raise the stakes to this human drama, I started writing the novel. It took almost 25 years, but Crossline has finally arrived.

The space adventure gets the action rolling, but there’s a saga that comes with it. And lest this all sounds a bit heavy … fear not. I replaced the original teenaged angst with some philosophical musings, cosmic shenanigans, and loads of humor, cuz like Plato himself liked to say, that’s just how I roll (or maybe it was Confucius, I forget).

In any case, if Crossline sounds like your kinda thing, it will be available both in print and e-book through my pals at Crazy8 Press. Coming soon.