I am so excited to see your excitement for the upcoming tours. Thank you for your eagerness, and I’m looking forward to the future!

Tours

I wanted to give you a quick note to remind you that the sign up for the Wilkie Collins tour will close Saturday morning (8 a.m. CST).

Next week, we’ll have a sign up for the Elizabeth Gaskell tour, which will overlap with Wilkie Collins.

I am so excited for all those who’ve signed up and I’m sure both are going to be fun tours around the the blogosphere!

We would like to plan to have another tour beginning the second week of January, but we need your help in deciding what authors would you love to see promoted via tour.

Go to the Suggest a Tour page and submit your authors and ideas. While right now we’re going to stay with authors, we may branch out in the future to subject tours. Please give us your insights and favorites so we have options to work with. I was thinking we select  a American author, but I’m up for suggestions!

Voting

In the middle of November, I plan on putting up a survey to vote for the January tour. Is that a good time to plan your reading for a January tour? Again, I’m open to suggestions.

A Community Effort

The most exciting thing about The Classics Circuit thus far is realizing how the community is joining together. Each of you will write a post for your blog. Our job it just to bring it all together, and I’m so excited how it’s all working out.

I’m realizing that this is going to be a lot of work to bring together a tour, and already I’m incredibly grateful to those who have helped out so far.

That great info about Wilkie Collins was compiled by Trisha (Eclectic/Eccentric), and Bella (A Bibliophile’s Bookshelf) is helping me organize the Collins tour. Elizabeth Gaskell book info (to be posted next week) was compiled by Eva (A Striped Armchair) and the Teresa (Shelf Love) is helping compile information about the life of Gaskell. Other bloggers are giving input behind the scenes as well, including Becky (Becky’s Book Reviews), Christine (booktumbling), and Cara (Ooh…Books). I’ve also gotten a few emails from some others who want to join in helping. I’ll be sure to get in touch with you too!

So the bottom line is that The Classics Circuit is turning in to a community effort. While I may post the surveys and the author info onto the website, there are a half a dozen other people who are helping out behind the scenes through emails, input, research, write-ups, and organization. I do truly appreciate all your help!

If you also want to help behind the scenes, send me an email at rebecca [at] rebeccareid [dot] com with “Classics Circuit Committee” in the subject line.

One more note: If you only want to subscribe to certain posts on The Classics Circuit, you can subscribe to each feed individually:

• General Information (such as this information post)
• Tour Schedule (future tour sign up, current tour schedules, past tour permalinks)
• Voting (voting for possible future tours, such as the Vote for November 2009 Circuit! post)

We are currently working on getting this site up and running. Please subscribe to the feed so you’ll get updates when we are ready to roll!