Organizing a joint Outer Alliance/Drollerie press blog tour

For lack of anyplace better to do it, this is a post I’m going to use for organizing a joint Outer Alliance/Drollerie Press blog tour. Parties interested in participating in this, please check behind the fold! Everyone else, keep watching this space, I’ll have more details as this gets organized!

Quick intro for those of you who’re peeking behind the fold on this post:

My fellow Drollerie Press authors and I have been doing blog tours throughout 2009, visiting each other’s blogs and sharing posts on various pre-selected topics. Some of these have been straightforward, some light-hearted, and in some cases, there have been outbursts of character sketches or prose snippets pertinent to our works.

Here are links to the various blog tours we’ve done so far:

• January 2009: Introductions
• In February 2009 we did “origin stories”, but I can’t find a master post link for that, sorry!
• March 2009: Character Interviews
• April 2009: Poetry
• May 2009: Mothers
• June 2009: Fathers
• July 2009: Summer
• September 2009: Music
• October 2009: Sweetest Day
• December 2009: Dangerous Writing

So what I’d like to do for 2010 is something similar to what we were doing for 2009, only this time around, we can have Drollerie authors go out and visit other people’s sites, spread the word about Drollerie, and give the folks who host our posts a chance to spread the word to our own readers about their work in the meantime. In exchange, Drollerie authors can host posts from the non-Drollerie ones on the same topic, whatever the topic of the tour might happen to be.

If we have enough people who want to participate often enough, we can keep to the monthly schedule, but I’m also open to “less frequently than monthly” if that works better for a majority of participants.

Topic-wise, I’d like to keep to a nice mix of casual and serious topics. In particular I’d like to have periodic topics that encourage people to indulge in brief bursts of creativity and do interesting little side glimpses of characters in their work–I love writing these myself and would definitely like to see such glimpses from other authors. Length of posts can be whatever people are comfortable writing, whether a few paragraphs or many, though I recommend not going over 1,000 words.

Depending on the number of participants for this tour or any to come, I suggest that we do a simple exchange of posts between Drollerie authors and non-Drollerie authors. If the number of participants is unequal, I can take volunteers to host extra posts to make up the difference, just so everybody gets to have a post hosted somewhere.

So what I’d like to know from potential participants are the following things:

1. Should we keep to a monthly schedule for this?
2. If a monthly schedule is too often, what interval would work for you?
3. What topics can you suggest for the forthcoming tour, or any to follow?
4. Since I’m pulling in authors from multiple locations, I could set up a mailing list for coordinating our efforts. Would you be okay with joining such a list? (Otherwise I can organize via posts right here on my site.)
5. How soon do you feel you might be able to whip up a post on the topic we all choose?

Please drop comments with your thoughts and I look forward to hearing from you all!