That girl who wrote that fic.

In the past, slashers who've attended cons like The Witching Hour and Lumos have complained afterwards that there wasn't much slash-oriented programming at these events. Some have suggested that HPEF* (the organization behind many of these fandom events) is anti-slash and discriminates against slash-oriented panels, while others have insisted that the number of slash panels that are submitted is small, and so what ends up in the program is representative. I'm not going to speculate about the truth. However, I do know that I gave away 400 slashcast buttons at Lumos (and there were about 1000 attendees), so we must have represented a heck of a lot more than 5% of the fans there.

In case you haven't heard, submissions for Prophecy have been extended until February 15. The deadline to submit a proposal to Sectus is February 28. (Edit: More info about preparing your submission to Sectus is HERE.)

The point of this post is to encourage YOU to submit a slash-oriented roundtable, panel, workshop, or presentation for Prophecy or Sectus. The more people who do it, the better the chance that more slash-centric panels will show up in the programming. Our registration dollars support these cons, so we should make sure that the kind of programming we want to see is (at least) proposed. By sheer numbers alone, we could have quite an impact.

( So what follows is my advice for writing a proposal for a fan conference, along with some things I think you should know about submitting to Prophecy in particular. )

This is may sound difficult and intimidating, but PLEASE consider submitting a slash-oriented proposal if you are planning to attend Prophecy or Sectus! The organizers can only create a program out of the submissions they get. If we make up more than a third of the con attendees, then it would be reasonable to expect close to a third of the programming to be slash-friendly. The more proposals we submit, the greater our chances of getting a significant number of them accepted. And that would make the cons more fun for all of us, right?

If you submitted a slash-oriented proposal to Prophecy, could you comment here? I'd be curious to know how many were submitted vs. how many will be accepted.

* I should note that Sectus is not an HPEF event, and that most of the organizers are active slashers. AFAIK, the event is overtly slash-friendly. I don't mean to imply that HPEF events aren't slash-friendly, of course, but there is a not-insignificant chunk of the fandom that thinks that is the case, and I do recognize that may be one reason why slashers tend not to submit proposals as much as others do.

Edit: To be clear, this is NOT intended to be a slam against HPEF. I don't think HPEF is anti-slash at all, but I know there are people who do. I want to encourage those people to submit proposals anyway, regardless of how they feel, because these cons are for all of us. If you don't submit, you really can't complain, right?

After some careful study of my work schedule for next summer and negotiations with MDH about the timing of our vacation, it's all set.

I have just registered for Sectus. W00t!