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.

The interesting thing about the Vikings is that, for me, as the author of a novel about them, I never really liked them very much. Well, that’s not exactly true. I never liked the public image of the Vikings. It was almost embarrassing: the stereotypical brawny warrior, horned-helmeted (a detail that is archaeologically unfounded, by the way), filthy and brutish, more beast than man. I do not dispute the facts of the Viking raids, or the Vikings’ male-centered ethos, or the numerous sagas depicting wild, raging battles fought by ferocious warriors. But as a 21st-century woman, I wanted to get past these testosterone charged images. I wanted to find a way to the Viking heart, assuming it was in there at all.

The poem, Hávamál (The Sayings of Hár) is part of The Poetic Edda. It outlines in detail the worldview of the Norse, as spoken by Hár, “the One-Eyed” god, one of the many appellations of the great god Odin. Much of the poem reads like passages from the biblical Proverbs, with Hár/Odin giving counsel to his listeners of all that is right and wise in a man’s behavior. The overtones are fatherly, and the focus is on the man’s world where hospitality, moderation, loyalty, wisdom, and self-control are key.

All hail to the givers! A guest has come
Say where shall he sit?

Such extravagant geniality seems simply pretentious, but it was also self-interested, I realized. The guest might as easily be a stranger as a well-loved friend. If a man didn’t welcome and treat his guests fairly, how could he count on such hospitality when he himself traveled through distant lands?