The Year That Changed Ally Carter’s Life (Except It Didn’t)

Ally Carter‘s debut novel, Cheating at Solitaire, came out last November, and she’ll tell you a little bit about her forthcoming YA novel, I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You, in the essay below. But as she explains, sometimes the difference even a hugely successful year makes in a writer’s life isn’t that much difference at all.

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, or as I like to call it, National Chocolate Day (because, really, isn’t that more inclusive?), and I can’t help but think about Valentine’s Days past. Remember when we covered shoeboxes with red velvet and everyone in class got a card from everyone else? Remember when flowers poured from the principal’s office like it was the Rose Parade and the hallway was Main Street in Pasadena?

Last Valentine’s Day, I had a nice day job and a publishing deal for Cheating at Solitaire and its sequel, Learning to Play Gin. I had a big box of chocolates and the notion that 2005 was going to be a good year. But in March, things changed. In March, it became a great year. It became—in a word—significant.

That’s when my agent asked if I’d ever wanted to write a young adult novel, and even though I sometimes doubt that I ever was a young adult (those Rose Parade-like flowers weren’t flowing to me), I said yes. By April I had an idea I loved and three sample chapters. By May, I had a deal with Hyperion which was significant, or at least Publisher’s Lunch thought so—it had the requisite zeros.

I’ll never forget that phone call from my agent, especially her parting words: don’t quit your day job.

Then June came and the call from Disney and the film option and yet another warning from my agent: don’t quit your day job.

Then came a number of foreign rights deals and an audio book deal, and you guessed it, I still didn’t quit my day job.

Pretty soon, I started to wonder what was so significant about this so-called significant deal. My agent was right; it wasn’t enough money to live on forever. I was still going to need health insurance and a 401(k). The true significance of what had happened didn’t really occur to me for weeks, or maybe months.

It started with two weeks during which everyone knew my name and my agent’s name and I was getting 80 hits a day on my website when, before, I was getting five—one of which I’m pretty sure was from my mother.

Then, the buzz died down. Somebody else had the requisite number of zeros, and the people who were Googling me started Googling them, and I was left with a significant amount of stress and worry and terror that this was my one great idea and I wasn’t going to do it justice.

Oh, and I gained a significant amount of weight.

I had the idea in March. The book will be released in May. That, in itself, is significant. It was like sprinting a marathon. I really, really don’t know if I could do it again. But I did it once, and that too, for me, is pretty freaking significant.

The final thing that’s significant for me is its insignificance. My roof still leaks, my fence still needs repaired, and I’m still buying my own chocolates. I’m even going to spend this Valentine’s Day doing the same thing I did last Valentine’s Day: writing.

Now I read Lunch Weekly and hear about significant deals, but I no longer imagine quitting my job and having a better life. Now I know I already have a good life, and that is maybe the most significant thing of all.

12 February 2006 | guest authors |