Back in 2016, I was in a scifi romance anthology entitled ROMANCING THE STARS, long since not available, for which I wrote a novelette of about 9K words entitled STAR CRUISE RESCUE. The requirement was to stay under 10K words and I always have a hard time “writing short” because I have so much action, adventure and romance to share. But for this project I figured I could tell a shorter story if I used my existing interstellar luxury cruise liner Nebula Zephyr as a framework.

I’d come across an i...