The Recap
Thank you for making Sirens so incredible again this year! You can see updates from the conference here on our LiveJournal. Guests and presenters wowed us with their thoughtful presentations, and attendees in the audience wowed us just as much with their insightful contributions. It was great to talk books, themes, projects, and favorites with all of you, and great to have generated dozens of books for our personal reading lists. Your participation and enthusiasm made Sirens so very special for us–and, we hope, for everyone who attended.

Website Open for 2011!
Check it out: The Sirens website is updated with information for 2011–including guests of honor Justine Larbalestier, Nnedi Okorafor, and Laini Taylor–and a new design to reflect next year’s theme of monsters and the monstrous. 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.

Monsters
And speaking of the updated website, we’ve updated information about the theme. Specifically, the theme is “monsters,” but we hope you’ll stretch beyond that to explore ideas around being “monstrous” in literature, especially as it applies to female characters and women-authored stories, and to ask questions about what it means to be monstrous, to be a monster, and so on.

Once you’ve had a chance to read and to think, we hope you’ll be interested in putting together a paper, a panel, a workshop, a roundtable, or an afternoon class; presentation proposals are due May 7, 2011.

Chat
If you’d like to start the brainstorming now, Sirens will have an open chat on Saturday, November 6, at noon Eastern. You’re welcome to bring thoughts about women in fantasy literature or questions about Sirens, and we’ll happily discuss our recent reads, monster or not. No particular software or programs are necessary to join in: this page will turn into a chat room at the appropriate time on November 6.

Registration
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 teas, a conference t-shirt, and all the mountain air you can breathe. You can also purchase Shuttle and Supper tickets at this time.

Presenter Recordings and Compendium
We’ve retrieved all of the recordings that we captured this year, and we will e-mail presenters with a link to download them soon. These are unedited .mp3s. Some recordings came out beautiful and crystal clear, and others did not, unfortunately. Please accept our apologies if yours includes some interference. (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, though presenters may choose to make their recordings available.)

Also, compendium submissions for presentations from 2010 are due by November 7, 2010. We will publish a combined collection with presentations from 2009 and 2010. 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).