I figure I earned this time off. I’ve spent a good part of the past nine months working on a proposal for a new book. To my great relief, and after sixteen drafts, my agent just sent it to my publisher at Penguin’s Gotham Books.

It was only after writing a detailing proposal that I realized how lucky I was to have avoided it the first time around. In a stroke of Cinderella-like luck, Gotham’s publisher, Bill Shinker, read a front-page article I wrote in The Wall Street Journal and emailed me about turning it into a book, which meant: I never wrote a proposal.

But writing is thinking. As my wise friend Allison Hoover Bartlett put it, all that painstaking work I’ve done over the past nine months is certain to lead somewhere.

I can only hope. Meanwhile, I plan to sprawl out on our battered couch over the next couple of days, transported by other people’s writing to an old stone house in Ramallah, to a two-man tent buffeted wind and rains in western Alaska, and to the great nation of India at the birth of its independence.