Of all the many different hats I've worn over the years, newscaster, daughter, wife, mother, Governor, Vice Presidential Candidate, cable television personality, my absolute favorite has been my time as an author. This may come as a shock to most people, but I've never been too fond of books. I never liked how they tried to say so many things at once and I always resented the way the words would jump off the page and attack my eyes like a swarm of angry, winged ants. But all that changed when I wrote my first book, Going Rogue. In my naive, pre-writer days I used to think that making books was all about sitting in front of a typewriter with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth and a nearly empty bottle of scotch just an inch away from tumbling to the floor like some kind of allegory for the ruin of all the wasted potential in your life. Well, I tried all that and while it certainly helped, I soon discovered that there's so much more to being an author than that.

When I went on the Going Rogue book tour, my eyes opened to the true nature of what it means to be an author. I was whisked away to the star-studded world of red carpets, nights awash in champagne and hot tubs full of busty women and male models moonlighting as paid company. Nights bled into days and days into more hazy, heady nights. I refused more syringes of the dark's myriad escapes than most people even see in movies. I was just a babe in the woods, really. It wasn't until one fateful evening when I found myself topless in Don DeLillo's suite at the Chelsey that I woke up to discover the obligations of my literary greatness.

Don't get the wrong idea. Don wasn't taking advantage of me and I wasn't throwing myself at him. To be honest, I don't know how I lost my shirt that night. All I know is that I was soaked in sweat and about one ounce of gin shy of Hell's gates. Don took of his jacket and handed it to me, saying he would put on a pot of coffee. Through the groggy spin of the room I remember him saying, "You're too good to go down like this, Sarah. You've got to reach down into that darkness you've got in you. You've got to go elbow-deep into that ugly place and pull out something true, something you love. You gotta write about the flags like you said you always wanted but were afraid to."

So, I got myself on the straight and narrow, went back to my antique Hermes and started punching those keys. The official title is America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag, but those first two bits were just suggestions from my publicist. You've gotta grab the base, right? Sure, I tossed off a few paragraphs about Todd and the brood, maybe 3/4 a chapter on Christianity just to placate the right parties. But my real labor went into the flag. I recount the pivotal moment in my childhood when I saw all those world flags waving at the Olympics, how I lost my innocence on an American flag sleeping bag, even the bloody, glorious day I bested a Spetsnaz sleeper agent in combat by strangling him with the Soviet flag he had pinned to his wall. Truly, flags are closer to my heart than anything else in this world.

The book is due out at the end of November.