An Unexpected Light has been designed to be modular, meaning that you can do the parts that appeal to you and skip the rest. Lessons are also downloadable, so that if you're participating in NaNo or you have something big come up during the course, you can download the content and come back to it when you're able.

Definitely not! New writers, hesitant writers, reluctant writers, aspiring writers, and discouraged writers are all welcome and encouraged! Almost all of the contributors to Octavia’s Brood, the primary text for this course, had never written fiction, let alone speculative fiction, before that project.

It can be! But it doesn't have to be. Course content has been designed to allow you to take your writing and your reflections in whatever direction feels right for you - you can focus on big topics like climate crisis and politics, or you can focus on more personal topics.

This course brings an intersectional feminist lens to the material, and it is explicitly focused on social justice. But you can identify however you would like! There are many reasons that someone might not identify as a feminist, including feminism's long and ongoing history of complicity with colonialism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and other oppressive systems.

You should be able to complete this course in 2-3 hours per week if you do everything. But I know that many of us are operating under scarcity and are time-crunched, so the course has been designed to allow you to do what you have time for, and still be able to come back to the new content each week.