The Brides’ Contest is going to be over in an hour and twenty-one minutes, give or take a second or two. I’m going to bed as soon as I finish typing this — and when I get up in the morning, Gunnar and I will be picking a winner.

Well, Gunnar will. I’ll just have to type in who it is. And I’ll announce it here. But I’ll also ask my webmistress to post it on my website. She has lots of updates to do at the beginning of the month, though, so don’t expect the answer there instantly. It will be here, though.

Thanks to all of you who entered. Martha, Louise and Alice had a lot of fun with it. So did Kate and Liz and I. We’ll have to do something like this again sometime. Maybe sometime in the autumn we will again have a surfeit of brides.

Remember, of course, that the Grooms’ BIGGER contest is still going on — and will be until February 10th. So you have plenty of time to enter that if you want. Of course you have to work a little harder than you did for the Brides’ contest. But that’s because Max and Theo and Domenico are g.u.y.s and they believe in getting out there and WORKING. Or they believe you should.

They, of course, are off on their respective honeymoons. Ted stayed behind at the last moment. He said it was all right with him. He enjoys it here by the fire in the winter. And he figured that Martha and Theo might be just a little busy with each other and not have quite enough time for him. Doesn’t matter to him as long as he has treats — and the last word.

Staying here, he has both.

So I was sitting here contemplating my collage — and my first chapter which seems to have bogged down in the coffee shop (what do these people WANT?), and I got an email from the editor of two different genealogical periodicals that I write for.

She said, “Just a reminder that you have an article due February 1st.”

And I consulted my calendar and wrote back, “Actually, you’ll see that I have one due February 15th.”

And she consulted her calendar — and our email correspondence and wrote me back: “Yes, you do. But that’s for the other magazine. You have a different article due February 1st for this one.”

Oh.

Gulp.

Nothing like a deadline in a day (when I have to take my mother to the eye doc 85 miles away tomorrow) to concentrate the mind. So I spent part of the day interviewing the head of the program I’m writing about and part of it figuring out the lead-in (which is the hardest part) and part of it making sense of the notes I took, and now I’ve got, um, about a third of an article. But I will get the rest done tomorrow. I might even get a little bit more done tonight. But not much. My eyes are crossing.

And I also had to write the monthly feature blurb for our Harlequin Presents Authors site (I’m the featured author for February on account of having a book out. Remember Theo and Martha? I thought you might.)

And I wrote answers to questions about writing for one of the romance book sites which I will tell you more about when I find out more about it. Suffice to say, today I was just interested in answering the questions. Where they go from here is not my problem.

And then, I walked the dogs and paid the bills and discovered that if I switch my internet provider and the tv (which we never even had for years, but now that the kids are grown, we do) to another provider, I can save $60 a month, and my head did the math rather more rapidly than I’m used to and thought brightly, “I could fly to England every year on what I’d be saving.” So that looks like it might happen.

It’s also snowing a little, which means sweeping the walk. Not snowing as much as this, but we already had this and most of it is still here. It also means fielding phone calls from my mother who spent 75 years in California and has blotted the years in Montana right out of her head. So she wants me to tell her how to dress. Um, warmly. Lots of layers. LOTS of layers.

It’s about -1 degree (F, not C) which make the snow squeak when you walk on it. She walks slower than I do. She needs more layers.

And I’m sure that’s more than you wanted to know about my day.

Sometimes just sitting home and working on the book is more interesting than having a life. More restful, too.

Remember the collage?

The one I was making so I could find my way inside Flynn and Sara‘s story? The one that had me scouring the internet and filching my friends’ upscale lifestyle magazines so I could nail down Irish castles and such? Not to mention my vast collection of pictures of Flynn and my several versions of Sara and such?

I put it together and it is still hanging above my computer. I can stare at it now, even as I type (except at night I have to lean to the right because the light reflects off it and I can’t see it unless I sit somewhat tilted). I still love it.

But I’m a little worried because the brother is on it. The dead brother. (I’ve got to give him a name. I can’t keep referring to him as the dead brother).

He was going to be Callum, but he can’t be Callum, because Callum is still alive and has a story in my head — and while he’s not going to be Flynn’s dead brother anymore, I couldn’t take everything away from him. And no, Jennifer Y., this is not another case of ‘authorial control.’ It’s a case of Callum insisting that enough is enough, and give the dead guy another name, please. So I will. But first . . .

I keep seeing possibilities for what might have been and now they’re not there anymore. I think that I might have to ‘rewrite’ the collage. And that sounds like more work than rewriting the book.

But now I realize that when I look up, I see what Flynn sees — a world that no longer exists. A future he thought was possible — and then was snatched away from him. It actually works pretty well. Sometimes.

But other times he’s going to have to be looking at Sara and not at his brother, and when he does that he’s got to be thinking life looks pretty damn good (at least when things are going well, he should think that. And at the moment he is still under the mistaken impression that they might be — good, that is).

But of course, he’s wrong. We wouldn’t have a book if he wasn’t.

So I think I might need a new collage to reflect that. A collage of Flynn’s life as he gets to know Sara again. A collage of the two of them building a life together. A collage where we add bits and pieces as we go along to reflect the book?

I think this might work into part of the Q&A I’m going to be doing on the eharlequin.com site next week. I will post a link as soon as I find out what it actually is.

From Monday to Friday, February 5-9, I’m going to be writing about and answering questions on “creating fictional worlds.”

It started out as a Q&A about writing linked books and how one goes about making sure that everything makes sense. But even if you only write one book, things have to ‘track.’ They have to make sense. The world has to work.

And I think, perhaps, the collage has to work, too. It’s giving me something to think about.

And I’m almost tempted to make one for Theo and Martha because Martha, being a muralist, is a very visual person. She would love the idea of doing a collage. It’s what she does often in her murals. And, in fact that’s sort of what her students end up doing on the walls of the theater. When I have time, I just might try it for Theo and Martha. I’m sure Ted will provide lots of pictures of himself and expect me to add a few 3-D dog treats for “realism.”

But for now, I’m going to be gathering bits and pieces for the Flynn and Sara collage, 2nd edition as Flynn and Sara and I come to grips with their story.

When I started this I never thought my collages would need rewriting, too.