Early September Update

OK, my intention to start blogging weekly again went off the rails.  [sigh!]  Now that it is September and we are mostly done with the summer running around it should be a little easier to blog regularly. …. I hope.  Here are a couple things that have kept me from blogging … honest.  🙂

New Abode Purchase: One of our big ‘distractions’ lately has been the purchase of a new place.  As I mentioned before, we currently live in Cranbrook, BC, but when Gina retires we want to move to Hope, BC to be closer to family.  Gina found a listing in Hope that had almost all the attributes we wanted so we scheduled a viewing, did the 10 hour drive to Hope, looked at the townhouse, and then drove 10 hours back to Cranbrook.  That was a crazy weekend.  We subsequently made an offer, did some bargaining, agreed on a price, read a bunch of legal and strata documents, and sent our deposit to the Realtor late last week.  We now know where we will be living starting early next summer.  🙂

Self-publishing on Hold Pending Re-write: My intention to self-publish Thera 4: Discernment has run up against a snag.  We received feedback from our beta readers and I put the first chapter onto Critique Circle.  Everyone seems to agree that I’ve put too much background information into the first chapter, so I need to sprinkle it through the novel more and have it come up more in the dialog as needed instead of in ‘aside paragraphs’.  It’s a little disheartening, because that will be a lot of work and I had thought we were almost ready to publish.  Then I have to remember I started this project as a learning experience among other things and I feel a little better about it … because I am learning a lot.  What did I expect? … So it’s going to be a month or 3 before we are to the point where we can think about publishing.  I’ll keep you posted on that.

*** WARNING Political Content Below ***

This blog is not intended to be a platform for political commentary, but with the federal election looming on October 19th, I will let some of my views show through here.  If you don’t want to read political stuff stop reading now!  😉

Federal Election:  As everyone in Canada knows, we are into a federal election.  This will be a bit of a distraction for me because I’m supporting the Green Party of Canada and will be doing some volunteer work for them.  A couple of the reason’s I’m supporting the Greens are:

1. Climate change is the single most important issue of our day.  We, as a species, need to stop dumping CO2 into our atmosphere.  It is warming our planet’s climate at an alarming rate.  The CO2 we’ve already put into our atmosphere will have some dramatic effects even if we turned off all CO2 sources today.  The longer we keep dumping CO2 into our atmosphere the worse it’s going to be for our children and all of our descendants.  Previous Canadian governments have been slow to act and the current government has taken us backward on this issue.  While I know the Liberals and the NDP will take this issue more seriously than the Conservatives, it is a central part of the Green Party’s platform and I want their message heard.
2. Education (including fundamental research) and Health Care are investments in the Canadian people, not business ventures.  Using a business model for these services puts priorities in the wrong place; short term monetary gain for the government.  If we, instead, perceive these as long-term investments in the Canadian people, then it becomes the mandate of the government to adequately support education and healthcare that every Canadian can access equally as needed.  I believe this investment in Canadians will pay Canada back many times over (in much more than simple monetary terms) during the lifetime of each citizen .  The Green party supports this vision in several ways including a pledge to remove tuition fees and increased critical support for health care.
3. There are a number of other issues where I think the Green Party including electoral reform* and inter party collaboration.**  Both of these are strongly supported by the Greens.

— Ron Evans (September 2015)

*Canada has a multi party system, but our electoral system is an antiquated “first past the post” system that only works in a 2 party system.  As a result a party can receive the majority of the parliamentary seats and form a majority government even if they have not received the majority of the popular vote.  (A case in point is our current Conservative government that thinks it speaks for Canadians even though 60.4% of Canadians voted against them in the 2011 election.)  We need a system of proportional representation so the make-up of parliament will represent how Canadians actually voted.

**The Green party promotes cooperation and collaboration with other parties, but the 3 major parties are very partisan.  I want to see our politicians working together for the good of our nation, not squabbling over partisan politics.

Where We’re at with Self-Publishing (and some other things)

I haven’t posted anything for over a week now.  Since we started this blog in January, I have tried to maintain a rate of at least 1 or 2 posts per week.  With the nice summer weather I’m finding that I’d rather be out doing other things instead of sitting in front of my computer, so expect our posts through the summer to become sporadic to non-existent.  We will be on holiday visiting family and friends through much of July, but sometime in August or early September we’ll be back to blogging.  Please check back then.

Anyway, the progress toward publishing Thera 4: Discernment is moving ahead … very slowly.  We’ve had two beta readers finish the book and give us some very useful feedback.  (Thank-you very much Elaine and Gareth!!!)

Meanwhile, since we have next to no budget to pay for an editor, I’m doing what I can to find ways to get the book edited without spending money.  I’ve looked at a couple self publishing how-to books and am trying some of the things they suggest.  Most recently I’ve been looking at Steven Spatz’s “The End – Now What?!” where he suggests several ways to pick out obvious errors.  First I blindly tried his suggestion that I find and replace all occurrences of period-space-quote with period-quote.  I did an auto find and replace.  Mistake!  I see what he’s trying to do; At the end of a quote you don’t want period-space-quote, but if the quote starts mid paragraph then you do you want period-space-quote at the beginning of the quote.  I did some other editing before realizing what I’d done and had to manually find and fix about 60 occurrences of period-quote that had originally been correct as period-space-quote.    After that I was a little more selective with his suggestions.  They are good suggestions as long as you don’t follow them blindly.  They are working better for me now.  I got to the place where he suggests you search for all occurrences of ‘they’re’, ‘their’, and ‘there’ and make sure these have been used correctly.  That was fine, but when I searched for ‘there’ … wow, do I use ‘there’ a lot in my writing.  So now I’m working through over 350 occurrences of ‘there’ and trying to eliminate most of them. 😛

These aren’t the most interesting parts of writing and it makes me wish I did have the budget for a professional editor.  Maybe on our next book we’ll be able to afford an editor.  😉

Anyway, I’m going to try several of the low cost on-line suggestions I’ve come across in the above book and elsewhere, but that will have to wait for our return from holiday.  I think between preparing to go on holiday and removing extraneous ‘there’s I have enough to keep me busy for this week and not much will happen through July.

That brings me to the last item I wanted to mention in this post. I know Gina hasn’t made any posts here herself, but she does read/edit most of the posts I make.  She is working full-time so this will probably continue to be our way of working until after she retires around a year from now.

Thank-you for following us and reading our blog over the past 6 months, and we look forward to blogging for you after the holiday.

Have a great summer!  🙂

— Ron Evans (June 2015)

Second Request for Beta Readers

The beta version of “Thera 4: Discernment” is now ready and yesterday I sent it to all those who have volunteered to beta read our story so far.  If you would like to beta read this book please leave a comment here or e-mail us at: scienceanywhere@gmail.com. Your comment or e-mail should contain your name, e-mail address and your preference of file format (epub, mobi, or pdf).

Remember if you volunteer to beta read, you will receive the most recent beta version of our book.  We realize that beta reading is a big job so if you send us feedback, as a token of our deep appreciation we’ll send you the final version of “Thera 4: Discernment” before it is offered for sale.  This version will contain a special Beta Reader Thank-you page where we will publicly thank-you by name for your contribution.

See the previous post for more details and a ‘blurb’ about our book.

Thank-you very much,

— Ron Evans

About Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

A few posts back, I promised to get back to you with more information about the CC BY-NC-SA license we were thinking of choosing for “Thera 4: Discernment”. As part of her job at College of the Rockies, Gina attended an Open Educational Resource conference in Banff a couple weeks back and I, being a retiree with all the time in the world, tagged along. A friend of ours, Paul Stacey, who we’ve known for years now works for Creative Commons was presenting there. (Paul was part of the BCcampus team that funded my Deep Space Astronomy and later our Web-based Associate of Science projects … wow! That was more than 10 years ago!) We got to have dinner with him so I asked about the CC BY-NC-SA license we were thinking of using for our book. He checked with the legal people at CC and then got back to us.

When using PressBooks to prepare your book for publishing you are given a choice of:
• No rights reserved (Public Domain)
• 6 different CC licenses
• All rights reserved

Most books I’ve seen use the All Rights reserved License, which is the most restrictive license and means you have complete control over your work, but this is changing. So why would we choose a CC license?

First off given today’s ease of sharing, you know that the people who have your book in electronic format and like it are going to be sharing it with their friends and relatives in spite of the fact that you’ve put an All Rights Reserved license on it. Technically they are committing a crime by doing this. So do you want your fans (the people who read and promote your book for free) to be criminals simply because they are sharing your book? Second, are you going to spend a lot of time and energy prosecuting these ‘criminals’? I can’t speak for anyone else, but for us the answer is “no” in both cases. So why not recognize this environment up front and use a Creative Commons license and don’t worry about it? The CC license allows free sharing. The more people who share your book the more free advertising you are getting and the more you become known. Yeah you don’t get money for it, but you weren’t going to get that money anyway without a lot of effort. The people who share your work are basically giving you free advertising and that is worth something. Someone who gets your book for free and likes it may actually buy your next book or a more recent version of the book they received for free. The people who like your book may recommend it to someone else who will buy your book.

Of the 6 possible Creative Commons licenses you can choose from, I’ll restrict my comments to the two I’m familiar with. When we did the Web-based Associate of Science project we were preparing educational resources and we wanted them to be available as widely as possible (and it was also a condition of our funding) so we chose to license all that material with a CC BY license. So all that work can be freely shared in whole or in part, but if anyone uses it, they must acknowledge that we were the original authors. In other words they must give us attribution, but they don’t need to ask us for permission to use our work and they can even sell it for their own gain if they want, though the fact that it is available for free reduces the likelihood of this. That is what the BY part of the license indicates. In the case of educational material this is what we wanted and it allowed us to become part of the North American Network of Science Labs Online (NANSLO) project because they used our work to set up a Remote Web-based Science Laboratory (RWSL) for the state of Colorado and beyond. My ex-employer is still benefitting from this.

Back to our scifi book: Since “Thera 4: Discernment” is a work of fiction we want a little more control over what happens to the work. We definitely want attribution if someone wants to use it and the ideas we present in this book, but we don’t want to be bothered with having to give permission every time someone wants to use part of our work (not that there would be a hoard of requests anyway ;-)). So we are including the BY in our CC license.

We also don’t want someone selling our book for profit unless they get our permission from us (and agree to give us a cut of the take), so we’ve attached the NC (non-commercial) restriction to our CC license. However, the NC is a bit more restrictive than we wanted and this is what we checked with Paul about. The NC restriction means that if you have a copy of our book you can give it to your friend, but you can’t legally sell it to them. That is what we wanted. However, it gets a little tricky when it comes to derivatives of our work. My original idea was that if, by chance, our work became very popular (probably highly unlikely, but it could happen, you never know) then others might want to write a story based on the world we created. This story would be a derivative. I am a little nervous about that because someone could make it into a ‘horror world’, which is not what we intended, but if for instance you wrote a story based on our world that was basically true to its original vision of Thera 4 we would be thrilled if you could sell your story for your own profit assuming of course you gave us attribution for the original work according to the BY part of the license. The downside is that the NC part of the license says that you technically could not legally sell your derivative story for your own profit. So the NC is a bit more restrictive than we wanted and there are no less restrictive versions of the NC restriction on the license. This means that I’ll have to make a note on the copyright page of the book requesting that derivative authors ask our permission to sell their derivative story. At the current time there are no flavors of the NC restriction, but the CC license is evolving so that could be remedied in the future.

Finally we want all work that is derived from our work to carry on the CC license, so all derivatives must carry the same license as our original, hence the Share Alike (SA) restriction.

That turned into a bit more of a document than I intended, so I hope that is understandable.

The result is, we will have a CC BY-NC-SA license on “Thera 4: Discernment” and I will include a note in the copyright section softening the NC restriction a little. So if you get a copy of our book you may share it, in fact we will encourage you to. 🙂

— Ron Evans (May 2015)

Beta Readers Requested

Hi All,

We think our story “Thera 4: Discernment” is getting close to being ready to publish, but the truth is we really can’t tell. We are much too close to this work to make this assessment. We need others to read the beta version and give us honest thoughtful feedback. Based on our beta reader’s feedback we can then improve our story and move onto self-publishing our book with a little more confidence.

Our story is hard science fiction and we feel it will appeal to a range of readers including young adults who like a thoughtful read. Below is a ‘blurb’ about the story. When we are done, we’ll publish it as an e-book on several platforms including Kindle Direct, Kobo, and others.

To make this happen, we are asking for some volunteers to read our short novel and provide feedback regarding plot & storyline, character development, plausibility of the science, world building, how the mystery unfolds, story flow & coherence, reader intrigue, and any other elements that might stand out for you. We need your honest feedback so you can write what you really think. Honest! We promise not to take it personally. In fact that is the whole point of beta reading. 😉

We realize that at over 62,000 words we are asking you to commit a significant amount of your time to this project and your time is valuable. Unfortunately we do not have the resources to pay you a fair wage for reading our story. If you volunteer to be a beta reader, you will receive a beta version of “Thera 4: Discernment”. And as a token of our appreciation, all beta readers who return feedback to us will also receive a copy of the final version of this book in epub (or mobi or pdf) format (your choice) before we release it for sale. The final version will include a page publicly acknowledging and thanking our beta readers by name for their service.

If you would like to be one of our beta readers, please leave a comment on this blog post saying you want to volunteer and containing your name, e-mail address and your preference of file format (epub, mobi, or pdf). Within a week or two I will e-mail you a beta copy of our book in the format you request (epub if you don’t specify). I’m just finishing some last minute edits now.

In advance, Thank-you very much,

— Ron Evans

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Book “Blurb”:
When junior biologist Alanie is awakened from cryo-hibernation for the second time on her interstellar survey mission she is just hoping she won’t be studying bacterial mats … again. As she makes her way to her quarters the first thing she notices is that the crew being dehibernated is much larger than the one she worked with last time. This seems hopeful. She soon learns an interstellar message was intercepted; subsequently Cygnus 7 had been redirected to the Thera system to make first contact with this unknown civilization. This is very exciting news, but in spite of a robust and diverse ecosystem there appears to be no civilization of any kind to make contact with anywhere in the Thera system let alone on Thera 4. As a result their mission has been augmented to include the assessment of Thera 4 for possible colonization. The more she learns about the Thera 4 biosphere, the less comfortable Alanie becomes with this idea. Since microscopic Thera 4 life is not hostile to terrestrial life and macroscopic Thera 4 life is usually very docile except in some peculiar but avoidable situations, it looks like the planet is the best one ever found for human colonization. Alanie is sure they haven’t found everything yet, but without a species ranking at level 16 or higher on the Janite Sentience scale she won’t be able to stop colonization. What she, Jareth, Dhurva, and their other teammates eventually uncover challenges their human-centrism and is far more subtle and complex than anyone ever expected.

Removing Story Blog Posts Monday May 4th

The editing of our story has continued so the blog posts here are no longer up-to-date.  As a result next Monday (May 4, 2015) I will make all 20 story sections “private” so they will no longer be visible on this site.  So if you haven’t read them and want to, you have until sometime next Monday.  If anyone asks I can always make specific posts public again for a short while.  Just leave a comment here.  I will not be removing the non-story posts (posts made more recently than March 31, 2015), so they will remain visible.

I will be making the beta version of “Thera 4: Discernment” e-book available to anyone who wants to be a beta reader about a week later.  Look for the Call for Beta Readers post that will appear here later today and request your copy with a comment on that post.

Thanks to everyone who has read the story we posted here, and an even bigger thanks to all who commented on, ‘followed’, and ‘liked’ our story posts.  Hearing from our readers is very important to us and spurs us on.

— Ron

Introduction to “Thera 4: Discernment” (AKA “The Assessment of Thera 4”)

One of other things that preparing the beta version of “Thera 4: Discernment” using PressBooks reminded me about is that I need an Introduction.  Duh…    Well, if I’d thought about it I would have known that, but sometimes its good to be reminded about such things. It would probably be better to post the introduction before posting the story, but … well I didn’t write it until a couple weeks ago when the story was finished.  So you get it after the fact.  🙂

Here’s the introduction that is now in the beta version of our book:

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Introduction:
One day a couple of years ago Gina and I were walking (we always walk) and discussing how it appears that our consciousness (our sentience) requires a physical network to exist. In the case of humans that function is supplied by the neural network of our brains. Of course as soon as you realize this it begs the question, “What other networks could support sentience?” We discussed many different networks from computer networks, to murmurating flocks of birds, to networks of bacteria, to crystalline structures, to transient networks based on snowflakes, to human networks, and even … well if I say that it will give the underlying premise of our story away so I leave that one for you to discover in the pages that follow. The result of our discussion was a number of story ideas. When you combine this to our eventual human exploration of the universe the question then arises, “If we came across an intelligence based on another kind of network would we even recognize it? and how?” This is a fascinating question.

Now consider:

• the number of exoplanets that are being discovered and the estimates that there are billions of planets orbiting in the habitable zones of their respective stars,
• the abundance of water in the universe,
• Max Tegmark’s speculation that consciousness (we are using the term sentience) is an emergent property of matter that is organized into particular complex patterns,
• the fact that we see evolution in the universe toward more complex atoms (under the right conditions of course),
• evolution toward more complex molecules,
• and on Earth the genesis of life from complex molecules,
• and its evolution to more complex forms of life,
• to sentient (aware, conscious) life,
• to sapient (thinking, reasoning) life,

and so on. Mix in the cosmological principle that is an underpinning of our cosmological theories (particularly the part that says there is no preferred observation location within the universe so we aren’t special here on Earth) and it seems perfectly reasonable that the trend toward more complexity and life that we see on Earth should be repeated innumerable times in the rest of the universe. Hence, there should be some form of sapience developed or developing in many places in the universe. Of course we have yet to find any evidence showing this to be true, but I would be very surprised if this isn’t what we eventually DO find when we finally get to venture to other suitable worlds. Of course in science fiction we are speculating and in speculative writing we can take this progression from the less complex forms of matter to sapient life forms as a given – and speculate away.

Another aspect of our story is that we are both fascinated by real science and what it can explain. We have both studied and taught science in our careers. (Gina was in biology and I was in physics and space science.) So to be true to ourselves, we have to make sure the science of the future that we invent at least shows some direct extrapolation from the science of today. Hence, there are no magical faster-than-light drives in this story. Nor do we assume things like telekinesis or telepathy. The result is that the technology we have supposed is probably fairly conservative and you will easily see analogs that currently exist today, but we don’t believe this hinders our story. The life forms we speculate about are situated within their own ecosystems and require the right conditions and sustenance to live. One of the things that our collaboration has resulted in is the idea that the life sciences will soon mature to the point where there will be some broad theories of life (in all its aspects) that are predictive and testable in the way that theories in physics are. This results in our characters using a new theory of evolution that predicts a certain kind of progress, and in the idea that the sentience of a species is a measurable quantity whose value can be extrapolated into the future. As a result, in our story we’ve replaced the old Star Trek idea of a “prime directive” with the idea that whether a planet can be colonized or not should be dependent on the sentience and sapience levels of the indigenous species and the level those species are likely to achieve in the next 10,000 years.

Also we are both basically optimists and our optimism that life will prevail should come through in our stories.

So mix all those things up and the story you are about to read is what resulted … this time around. As mentioned above, we have many more story ideas that will develop these themes further, but only time will tell if we ever develop them beyond the idea level.

It would be interesting to hear your thoughts about the ideas we present. Whether you find them plausible or not or whether you agree or not, only by discussion can ideas grow and change and take on a life of their own. This is how we humans learn and achieve new understanding of the universe we inhabit.

Finally, regardless of all that I said above, stories are primarily meant to be enjoyed, so whatever else you might take from our story, we hope you enjoy your visit to Thera 4.

Have fun.

— Ron Evans (April 2015)

Our Cover Art

One of the things that PressBooks gets you to do is upload your cover image.  This was a problem because we had none.  The how-to-books I consulted all suggest you hire an artist and get them to make a cover image for you.  They also suggest a lot of other things I haven’t done as well.  I’m retired and on a modest pension and Gina will be retiring soon, so we’re in this for the fun of it and not looking to make millions of dollars off our work, so anything that sounds too much like work or costs very much money is not going to happen.  This means I had to figure out a cover myself and that was fun.

There are two pieces of open source graphics software:

Gimp: similar to Photoshop, but free

Inkscape: similar to CorelDraw, but free

I used Inkscape to create many of the diagrams I needed for a second year physics lab project I worked on for the local college a couple years ago, but I’d never looked at Gimp before.  Both are complex programs, but you can do pretty well everything you could do with the very pricey alternatives.  Both have extensive help files, but I mostly subscribe to the trial and error method.  If it works use it, and if it doesn’t try something else.*

So I downloaded Gimp and below is the cover 2 long days of effort resulted in.  It isn’t exactly the concept I was imagining initially, but it is adequate for our purposes and we both like the results.  🙂

One thing I should mention is I used a Hubble Telescope image of the Carina Nebula for the background.  This is OK, because all NASA produced images are freely accessible to the public and the only requirement for using them in your work is that you give credit to NASA.  I have no problem giving them credit.**

Anyway back to our cover.  Here it is along with the “About the Cover” piece I wrote to go with it in the book:

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Our Book Cover
– Background by NASA

About the Cover:
While filling in the meta-data for this book, I realized we needed a cover image right away. At first I had grand ideas of drawing the landing clearing as viewed from within the forest. I downloaded Gimp (a free graphics program like Photoshop) and set to work. … Well Gimp is a very complex program even if it is free, so my cover concept became rather simplified to match my minimal Gimp skills. What you now see in this cover image is an approximation of a scene from the story. It starts with a Hubble image of the Carina Nebula from NASA to provide the backdrop. No it wouldn’t really look like that from Thera 4 and it isn’t the nebula that hides Thera from Earth, but images of the sky from Thera 4 are in short supply.  😉 Then I added some public domain clip-art branch silhouettes. Yes there would have been leaves on the branches that Alanie sees, but we thought the bare branches looked way cooler. I did say this cover was an “approximation” of a scene from the story and besides it would have taken me a long time to draw various leaf shapes and add them to all the appropriate places. Also the leaves would have hidden the beautiful Carina Nebula. … Then in Inkscape (a free graphics program similar to Corel Draw) I modified a monkey silhouette to represent a prime and drew a post insectoid from scratch. These were added to the cover image and Gimp provided the font for the title. It only took a couple days, but we have a book cover now. 🙂

Gina and I are pleased with the result.

Enjoy

— Ron Evans (April 2015)

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*One important concept to keep in mind when working with Gimp is that it uses layers.  Our cover has the background layer (by NASA), the branches layer, the critters layer and the text layer.  For instance when I made a mistake with the branches, I could edit that layer without affecting the other layers.  I’ll leave Gimp and Inkscape for you to explore on your own.

**It’s interesting that in the much more closed environment of the late 1950s and early 1960s during the height of the cold war when NASA was just starting out, the decision was made that since NASA’s funding was from tax dollars, all NASA generated data including images would be released freely to the public.  The people that made this decision were visionaries and the resulting openness has only helped NASA over the decades since.  It has also helped us (all humans) to shift our thinking to a more global scale (but that is another blog post for another time).  The decision to make NASA’s data freely available was made long before today’s open information movement was even thought of.  As a result of our work in education, both Gina and I support open access to information particularly where educational resources are concerned (that’s another blog post for another time too).  This belief in open access to information informed our choice of a Creative Commons License for our book. … When you think about it, the scientific process works best when information and data are shared openly and freely. … Don’t get me started.  😉

Meta Data addition

After doing a little research and checking some things out we decided to try PressBooks to convert our story to a publishable document.  I know there is probably at least a beta reading step we still need to go through, but my hope that I would receive feedback from more than one person by publishing the story to a Word Press blog first has not worked out the way I thought it might.  (Thank-you so much Elaine for reading through our story and giving us your thoughts!)  Yep that’s it one reader, my sister.  That isn’t an overwhelming response so I obviously went about that one wrong. 

Anyway, if/when I do find some willing beta readers I’ll need to send them something to read.  I could just send them a Word document or a PDF, but if they’re going to take the time to read our work they probably don’t want to sit in from of their computer all the time to read it, particularly since our story is over 60,000 words long. I’ve also signed up to be a beta reader for another blogger so I can see what it’s like and know how to do it better.

So I decided to experiment with PressBooks, kind of a dry run for what I’ll have to do to actually publish our work for sale.  PressBooks gives you a free account and you can publish as many versions of one book as you want for free.  Free is always good and the PressBooks advertising that appears in the published book is quite unobtrusive.  I will probably pay for the final book to be devoid of the advertising though.

If you are blogging your work on WordPress already you can take your blog posts directly into Press Books, which is attractive, but I didn’t do that as I’ve made some changes since I put the blog version up, so I copied out of Word and pasted into PressBooks.  There were no issues with that method.

One of the things that PressBooks gets you to do is to add a bunch of meta data.  (As Gina says, meta data is data about data.)  I don’t know if I’ve done this entirely right, but below is what I added along with some notes in [ ]:

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Copyright:
CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike)

[Note – We chose a Creative Commons license because we very much believe that information should be open.  I’m not sure if this particular CC license will do exactly what we want or not, but I’ll check that out before we go to the for sale version of the book.  Our previous work was all educational material and it was published under the CC BY license, which got us additional work when a Colorado based consortium picked up our work for a project they were working on and hired us to work with them. win-win!  😉 ]

Copyright Notice:
This entire work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license. As such if you use any part of it you must give us (Ron Evans and Gina Bennett) attribution but you need not get our permission. You may not sell this work in part or in its entirety without our expressed permission. However, you may make derivative works as long as you attribute the original work to us and you must share your derivative work under the same CC license we have used.

Further, while you may make any derivative work you want, we request that as a courtesy you keep your derivative work true to the intent and spirit of our original. If you have any questions we would be happy to discuss them with you.

Thank-you.

— Ron Evans and Gina Bennett

[Note – Our idea is that we want our book to be sharable, but we intend to keep its price low, so that there will be a little income from it.  We don’t want someone selling it for their profit, but we want others to be able to make derivative works, which they can sell as long as they keep the same spirit of openness.  Is this particular CC license correct for this?  I hope so, but as I said above we’ll be checking on this before we publish the for sale version.  I’ll let you know once we know.]

Book Tagline:
Suppose you receive a signal from an intelligent source, but when you get to the planet of origin there is no one home … or is there?

Short Description:
When junior biologist Alanie is awakened from cryo-hibernation for the second time on her interstellar survey mission she is just hoping she will not be studying bacterial mats … again. What she eventually uncovers on Thera 4 is far more complex than that.

Long Description:
When junior biologist Alanie is awakened from cryo-hibernation for the second time on her interstellar survey mission she is just hoping she won’t be studying bacterial mats … again. As she makes her way to her quarters the first thing she notices is that the crew being dehibernated is much larger than the one she worked with last time. This seems hopeful. She soon learns that there was an interstellar message intercepted and that Cygnus 7 was subsequently redirected to the Thera system to make first contact with this unknown civilization. This is very exciting news, but in spite of a robust and diverse ecosystem there appears to be no civilization of any kind to make contact with anywhere in the Thera system let alone on Thera 4. As a result their mission has been augmented to include the assessment of Thera 4 for possible colonization, which Alanie grows less comfortable with the more she learns about the Thera 4 biosphere. Since microscopic Thera 4 life is not hostile to terrestrial life and macroscopic Thera 4 life is usually very docile except in some peculiar but avoidable situations, it looks like the planet is the best one ever found for human colonization. Alanie is sure they haven’t found everything yet, but without a species ranking at level 16 or higher on the Janite Sentience scale she won’t be able to stop colonization. What she, Jareth, Dhurva, and their other teammates eventually uncover challenges their human centrism and is far more subtle and complex than anyone ever expected.

[Note – After writing the above 3 sections I really want to read this book.  😉 ]

Keywords:
science fiction, fiction, novel, novella, story, young adult, mystery, book, books, literature, canadian literature, contact, first contact, evolution, life, life genesis, narrative, narratives, scifi, sci-fi, story, stories, author, authors, canadian, reading, short fiction, uncategorized, writer, writers, young adult literature, YA, thera, thera 4, cygnus 7, discernment, Thera 4: Discernment

[Note – The keywords are a bit of a guess on my part.  I tried to pick words so that someone doing a search might come across our book.  I’m sure these could be improved upon.]

Bisac Subject:
FIC028090 FICTION / Science Fiction / Alien Contact
FIC028020 FICTION / Science Fiction / Hard Science Fiction
FIC028030 FICTION / Science Fiction / Space Opera (marginally)

[Note – I never heard of this before, but the website:

https://www.bisg.org/bisac-subject-headings-list-fiction

  was very helpful in selecting the appropriate subjects.]

Bisac Regional Code:
Not used — but see https://www.bisg.org/bisac-regional-themes for information.

[Note – Since our story takes place on a distant planet and none of the subject matter is specific to a particular region of Earth, I didn’t choose a regional code. There was no code for extraterrestrial locations.  😉 ]

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Pressbooks was very easy to use, although I did have to look around for what it was asking from time to time and I did make some stuff up, which was hopefully the right thing to do.  PressBooks also wants you to upload a cover image, so I’ll talk about that next time.

— Ron Evans (April 2015)

Changing the Story Title to “Thera 4: Discernment”

To date we have only published the story as we wrote it here on this part of our blog. Even though I will make these next posts under the same category in our blog, what I am going to do in the next several posts is relate our experience around turning this story into a self published work. This will not be intended as a “How to” manual on self publishing since we’ve never done it before, but will only tell our experience.  I expect we’ll probably describe a lot of what NOT to do, but hopefully there will be a couple examples of something that should be done as well.  Stay tuned.  🙂

The first thing Gina and I decided to do was try and find a better title.  “The Assessment of Thera 4” was our working title and it was OK, but when we started thinking about publishing we decided it needed something better.  While the working title tells you what the characters are doing on Thera 4 it isn’t a particularly exciting title.  Sounds too much like exams in school.  Also, if we were to write more stories about Thera 4 we need a title theme so that all the stories (books?) would appear to be a set.  (Notice I said “IF”.  There is no promise implied here, but we have discussed what future generations on Thera 4 might experience.  Whether those discussions turn into additional Thera 4 stories remains to be seen and depends on our experience with this first work.)

Anyway, after some discussion the new title for “The Assessment of Thera 4” is “Thera 4: Discernment“.  This title leaves room for possible additional stories, is short, tells what the characters are doing on Thera 4 on multiple levels, and it carries (we think) more … um … punch.

We won’t change the story title on this blog, but in the future expect the new title.

In the next couple posts I’ll describe the meta-data and other things required for actually self publishing this story into a real book.

Enjoy

–Ron Evans