Welcome to the Speculative Literature Foundation!

The Speculative Literature Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting literary quality in speculative fiction. We encourage promising new writers, assist established writers, facilitate the work of quality magazines and small presses in the genre, and work to promote a greater public appreciation of speculative fiction. Our mission is to promote literary quality in speculative fiction through our grants, programming, and more!

The SLF serves the speculative literature community through support from people like you. We’re a 501(c)3, and all donations are tax-deductible in the U.S. You can make a one time donation or become a member to receive cool perks like discounts for our courses and events, access to our bi-monthly writer’s encouragement letter, yearly anthology, and more!

Screenwriting for Writers Course Pushed Back

Our screenwriting class is back! In Screenwriting for Writers, students will develop a project toward first draft or subsequent draft completion. Peer and Instructor feedback will augment their own evaluation of their work. Projects may rotate from week to week to give enough time for in-session reading and discussion. In addition to script pages, writers will create a logline and short outline that clarifies the story of their script and aids in evaluation and rewrites.

How long is the workshop? 6 Sessions (Sessions are 2.5 hours)
When? April – May, 2023
What time? Sundays, 2:30 – 5:00 PM CST
Location? Zoom
Instructor? Ted Schneider
Number of students who can sign up? 12
How much? $350 (discounted rates for SLF members)

Your Instructor

Ted Schneider is a director, writer, actor, consultant and teacher. His film “Early Light” won the Soldier’s and Sacrifice Award at the 2020 Flicker’s Rhode Island International Film Festival. His first short, “Nothing Happened,” won awards at Trenton International Film Festival March on Washington Film Festival, White House Screening. His current film, “Iqaluit,” is screening in festivals such as the 30th Annual Arizona International Film Festival (2022) Flicker’s Rhode Island International Film Festival (2022) Boston Short Film Festival (2022) Detroit Trinity International Film Festival (2022). Upcoming: “Tell Me Something Else” Short Film (post-production). Earlier this year, Ted became the story editor for an untitled feature film project from East2West Entertainment.

As an actor, Ted has appeared alongside F. Murray Abraham, Amy Irving, Lynn Cohen, Bill Irwin, Michael Shannon, Reed Birney and Dierde O’Connell: Shakespeare, Chekhov and new works by Clare Barron, Naiomi Wallace and Lanford Wilson. He is a member of the theater and film group The Chekhov Project at Lake Lucille and holds a BFA in Theater Arts (Acting) from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and an MFA in Cinema Arts (Directing) from the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, Brooklyn College.

The novelette (between 7,500 and 17,500 words long) can be a challenging but rewarding form for SFF writers. As a novel in miniature, it requires authors to think about narrative structure in ways that differ from the specific requirements of the short story, with a more complex plot that frequently falls into distinct acts. Because a novelette can be written in a shorter timeframe than a full novel, it allows writers to develop and refine skills that will be useful for longer projects, while also providing a form that is deeply rewarding in itself. This workshop will focus on idea generation, structure, and editing with an emphasis on the novelette, as well as elements of craft that can be applied to fiction of any length.

How long is the workshop? 1 Session (2.5 hours)
When? May 25, 2023
What time? 10:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST
Location? Zoom
Instructor? Alec Nevala-Lee
Number of students who can sign up? 30
What’s the price? $60 (discounted rates for certain tiers of SLF membership)

Instructor: Alec Nevala-Lee

Alec Nevala-Lee has published numerous stories, including ten novelettes and two novellas, in the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Three of his novelettes—”The Boneless One,” “The Spires,” and “At the Fall”—have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies, including The Year’s Best Science Fiction by Gardner Dozois. He is the author of three suspense novels from Penguin, and his nonfiction book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (Dey Street / HarperCollins) was a Hugo and Locus Awards finalist and an Economist best book of 2018. His latest book is Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of Esquire‘s fifty best biographies of all time. He is currently writing a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis W. Alvarez for W.W. Norton.

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Our mission is to promote literary quality in speculative fiction through our grants, programming, and more.

The SLF is made possible by the kind contributions of those who believe in our mission—people like you. We’re a 501(c)3, and all donations are tax-deductible in the U.S. 

For gifts over $1,000, gifts of stock, or to explore funding a grant, please contact our Development Director, Margaret Frey, and she’ll be happy to assist you. We encourage you to apply for matching funds from your employer if possible!

If you’d prefer not to use PayPal, we can also accept donations through our local community foundation.

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