Most writers don’t really retire — they dream up a big project and write a book about it. That’s just what Barry Golson did for Gringos in Paradise: An American­ Couple Builds Their Retirement Dream House in a Seaside Village in Mexico (Scribner, $26).

Why is a year such a handy tool for a writer? The honest truth is that I didn’t go down there with the idea that this was going to take a year. My wife and I set out in November of ’04 to try out retirement and to buy a lot and build a house in Mexico that would be our dream house — because I had fallen in love with a little village on the coast. I really didn’t know how long it was going to be before I started writing, before I understood what the time frame of the book would be. By the following November, just before Thanksgiving, in a rush of craziness, we finished our house and, at the same time, invited my entire family down [for] Thanksgiving. We were nuts; our bank account was depleted, but we’d had the adventure of our lives. It couldn’t have been a better ending. It couldn’t have been more perfect. This is a long way of saying it was serendipity. I didn’t plan the year, but it sure worked out.

Did you write throughout the year? There’s an old saying that good poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” My prose was emotion recollected two weeks later.