I haven't been to a con in ~15 years thanks to kids and scheduling conflicts, but something I've noticed about fanfic over that time is that it has become both much more "mainstream" - that is, when I talk about fanfic I no longer have to tell people what I mean, they already know even if they haven't partaken of it themselves - as well as becoming more looked sideways at. Not that it's looked down upon entirely (though there's certainly some that do), but given the massive explosion of fanfic available on the net, the percentage of good fanfic has gone down so that while there's certainly plenty of good fanfic out there, many people mostly see all the stuff that's mediocre at best and really bad at worst. So I wonder if part of the issue is that with so much bad fanfic out there, the organizers aren't convinced that it's worth it to devote an hour or two of time to something that they see as unlikely to be a high quality panel. That said, I think an angle you might be able to use is to point out that this is a panel about said high quality fanfic, and how to find and/or write the good stuff (or however you feel it's best phrased) rather than just talking about all the bad fanfics you've found.

I know that the quality of fanfic writing is all over the place, but if there were more panels on writing it maybe it would help some of them improve. Then again, the biggest flaw I've seen in fanfic over the past 15+ years is that way too many people post without even doing a spell and grammar check in word/openoffice/google docs, let alone actually proofreading it properly. And while some people do have others read and critique it before (or even after) posting, it's rare to find an author with a sizable group of prereaders to help them out like you see here (or at least used to, I don't know how the studio is operating these days). But I don't know if that's a cause or effect of having fewer writing-related panels in the modern day where video rules...

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
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EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>