A quick story about this whole billboard thing. When I was 21, my friend Jason (yes, his name is Jason, too) were signed to HarperCollins. We were young, ambitious, irreverent and had chips on our shoulders as big as the world.

Whenever anyone in publishing asked us what our goals were, we’d say what most 20-somethings would say, that we wanted to change the way people thought of writers. That maybe we could be what athletes and musicians are. Maybe.

No one discouraged us. I mean, there was no need to. We were kids who came to the book world through an unusual path, and therefore always had “unusual” views about the whole thing. One day, in an effort to prove our point, we played a prank on our editor and agent. We made this.

This is the Calvin Klein billboard on the corner of Houston and Lafayette (for my NYers). It’s all photoshop. Pictures we took in our living room in Brooklyn. We emailed it to everyone early in the morning and they all lost it! The phone calls came in,

and everyone tried to organize a time to go downtown to see it for themselves. No one questioned why there would be a billboard of two unknown young men, selling nothing. Especially on what EVERYONE knows is the Calvin Klein billboard. No questioned anything.

And when we finally called it off and told them it was a prank, we told that the fact that NONE of them batted an eye, the fact it seem plausible that we’d be on a billboard, made it clear that l, perhaps, someday we would. Shouts to my brother Jason Griffin. No one just happens.