The Intrepid Force saga actually began in 1979 when I was a freshman in high school. I was a big fan of comic book superhero teams like the X-Men, the Teen Titans, the Fantastic Four, and the Legion of Superheroes. I also loved Ray Bradbury's science fiction novels and short stories. On the weekends I used to meet with my friends Ivan Wilson and Kelly Farrar and we would dream up characters and story plots. We included elements of our favorite stories, current scientific theories, life experiences, dreams, nightmares. . . It was quite a hodgepodge, quite a strange brew we had put together. Looking back on the early novels and short stories, I see bits and pieces of rich imagination strung together by some pretty bad connective tissue. The parts were cool, but the whole was disjointed. I'm glad I kept those old stories around. Later in life, after I'd written Sign of the Sword, Season Out of Time, and parts of some other novels, I dragged out the old manuscripts and began work on the Intrepid Force novels as they now exist. I dropped a number of the old subplots because they pulled the story into too many directions. Then, gradually, I found ways to re-introduce a number of them in ways that actually fit the story. In the old days, we dropped the Neema character into the mix because we thought it would be cool to have a girl from the future. Never mind what she was doing there. Now, as those who have read both Intrepid Force and Invasion know, Neema not has a crucial role in the story. The first Intrepid novel, with its many subplots, probably shows some evidence of this while the later novels show a more intuitive progression from one event to the next. I still like that first novel though. It will always have a special place in my heart because of the time of life it represents to me.