My office is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on Wallabout Bay in the East River, just across from Manhattan. A few years ago a security guard pointed to the water and said, “That’s where the British tossed ten thousand dead Americans.” Did I know that during the Revolutionary War more people died on Brooklyn prison ships than in all the battles combined?

No, I did not.

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.