Crowd-Sourced Sirens Fandom Panel brainstorming

So, I'm going to be at Sirens Conference 2012 in Skamania, WA this fall, and I'd like to impanel a panel on fan fiction there. Let me quote the 2012 theme for Sirens at you, and you'll see why:

Within our focus on fantastic women, each year Sirens features a fantasy-related theme—and in 2012, that theme is "tales retold." Women have been storytellers, oral historians, and eloquent entertainers for thousands of years, and in 2012, Sirens will celebrate—and participate in—that tradition. Within the larger question of women in fantasy literature, we will examine and dissect retellings of tales from around the world.

This theme screams "fan fic and fandom" to me, and I'd like to have something about those things at the conference, partly because I'd like to avoid an entirely folklore-themed conference (especially given that the 2010 theme was Fairies), and partly because the last panel about fandom that I attended at Sirens (again in 2010) was…frankly a little bit uncomfortable, and weird. Everyone on the panel seemed ambivalent about fandom at best, and downright negative at worst (to be fair, everyone up there seemed to have been a veteran of the Potter fandom wars), and I wound up being that one audience member who kept disagreeing and wouldn't shut up. My fandom experience has been, on the whole, wonderful, and fandom and the friends I've made here have unequivocally been great forces for good things in my life. I don't want, or intend, to present a "fandom is 100% kittens and rainbows!" because anyone who reads this journal, hopefully, is well aware that I'm under no illusions on that score, and also because I do think the issues of fandom would be interesting to talk about in the context of Sirens' theme.

So, I have two questions, dear readers. One: if you're planning to attend Sirens, would you be interested in being on this panel? And two, what would you like the panel to discuss? Anything from specific topics to suggested ways to frame the panel discussion are more than welcome!

Objectively, I've had better Wednesdays

# Good watch clasp broke last weekend. Mailed it off under warranty on Monday, substitute piece of crap watch stopped in Chinese this morning.

# Made chili tonight. Exploded a can of tomatoes on myself secondary to the can opener being a piece of shit. I've since ditched the can opener. Then I burned my thumb with chili.

# Some asshole stole the pannier off my bike while it was locked outside my department. True, I'd been contemplating getting another one, but did I need that $50 expense right now? No I did not.

# Seminars today were not good. No one did the reading in my advisor's class, including me, so I did most of the talking (!) based on a) high school history classes and other assorted whatnot; b) stuff I skimmed out of the PDF in class; c) class notes from a different seminar last fall. Yeah. Painful. In my department head's seminar, we were discussing one of her books, probably my single favorite work of history writing ever, and…the discussion was terrible. Other people apparently didn't understand her process or argument (!) and we got bogged down for eons in a long disquisition on how historians are bad at writing about war. No, I don't think her book is difficult. I think her book is exhilarating.

# I have a headache. Having unloaded these complaints, I am going to go to bed.

# All in all, my decision to have a glass of wine before seminar was actually quite smart. And other things about today were fun.

# I'm going to try to buy plane tickets to Argentina tomorrow. Wish me luck.