The Recap
Sirens’s first year was fantastic! We had a great time listening to all of the formal presentations and informal discussions, getting recommendations for new books to read, sharing tea with new friends, and generally being delighted that we had such awesome attendees. We’re thrilled that your participation and enthusiasm means that we can provide a second Sirens conference on women and fantasy literature in 2010, too.

Website Open for 2010!
Check it out: The Sirens website is updated with information for 2010–and it’s changed to reflect next year’s theme of faeries. Please take a few minutes to look around, to note updates, to grab a new icon/desktop image/banner, to use the Tell a Friend feature, or to check out the updated reading list.

Talk About It All
Sirens will have an open chat on Saturday, November 7, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time. This year, we’ll be holding occasional chats–which might become regular with enough interest–for 2009 attendees, potential 2010 attendees, people who have questions about becoming attendees, and people who just want to chat with some amazing people about books, authors, and other things. You’re welcome to bring thoughts about women in fantasy literature or questions about Sirens, and if you’re looking for something more focused, we’ll be choosing a faery book from the Sirens 2010 reading list to discuss at each chat. November is Janni Lee Simner’s Bones of Faerie. No particular software or programs are necessary to join in: this page will turn into a chat room at the appropriate time on November 7.

Registrations and Reservations
With the website open, registration is open as well. Registration is currently at $165, and it includes all of Sirens’s programming, events, keynote presentations (with a dessert reception and two lunches), one breakfast, afternoon tea, a conference t-shirt, and all the mountain air you can breathe. You can also purchase some separate, optional items: tickets for the Sirens Shuttle from Denver International Airport to Vail (with a trip to Vail on Wednesday, October 6 and another on Thursday, October 7, with one return trip on Sunday, October 7) and tickets for the pre-conference staff-hosted Sirens Supper.

Rates at the Vail Cascade have undergone a slight adjustment, now that their renovations are complete, but they’re still fantastic for Vail in the autumn months. To make your hotel reservation at the Vail Cascade Resort and Spa, please visit the hotel page (and, as always, if you have any issues making your reservation, please let us know).

Programming
And, of course, the programming proposal system is open now as well. The schedule for Sirens is, in large part, made up of presentations by and of interest to attendees. You may make proposals until May 7, 2010, so there’s plenty of time to brainstorm and put your proposal together. To get started, take a look at the Call for Proposals and the presentation elements, as a few things have been changed for the next year.

If you’re curious about the scope of Sirens, the Call for Proposals is a good place to start:

The theme for 2010 is “faeries,” and programming prompted by the theme is encouraged; presenters are not limited to this theme, however, and proposals that address specific aspects of a work or series, works related by other themes, and studies of the fantasy genre across all disciplines are encouraged as well. A non-exhaustive list of sample topics includes literary analyses of novels; studies of genre history; use of fantasy works in schools and libraries for education; examination of related business and legal issues; media and fan studies; craft-based workshops in writing, art, and publishing; and overviews of how fantasy works fit into larger contexts.

In other words, if it’s connected to women authors, professionals or characters in fantasy and you find it interesting and worthy of discussion, there’s a good chance someone else does too.

Presenter Notes from 2009
If we made a recording of you and it turned out okay (unfortunately, some did not), you should have received a notice about where you can download a copy. If you don’t have a notice for a particular presentation that was recorded, and it’s not in your e-mail’s bulk folder, it’s safe to assume that the recording wasn’t salvageable. (Please note that these recordings are only available to presenters; Sirens does not have the authorization from all the presenters to distribute these more widely.) Thank you to everyone who allowed us to experiment with our recording software this year–and we hope to capture more recordings in future years.

Also, compendium submissions for presentations from 2009 are due by November 15, 2009. On that date, we’ll review the overall submissions and decide whether or not we’ll need to combine the papers with next year’s presentations, and we’ll let you know the status of the compendium as soon as we can. If you’ve lost your link for making your compendium submission, please write to (programming at sirensconference.org) and we’ll send it to you again.

Have questions? You can leave them here in the comments section or e-mail them to (help at sirensconference.org).