My name is Craig and I am a … writer.
No really, I am. I’ve been getting paid for writing (some editing, some on-demand research) for 25 years, and more or less support a family of five this way on the outskirts of New York City. (Minus some discreet subsidies from my aging parents “for the grandchildren,” minus steadily but not explosively rising debt.)
And during all of those 25 years, pretty much every day of them, I’ve been propelled by the dream of writing a BIG, IMPORTANT book. Well, now it seems like I have a chance, something of a chance. And of course I am very afraid– afraid I’ll fail, afraid I’ll succeed and the dream will turn out to be a nightmare of drudgery, afraid it will leave me in such deep debt I’ll have to get a desk job again at some dreadful place like Bloomberg News, afraid people will laugh at me, afraid above all that for all these reasons I’ll quit before I even really try, and grumble around for the rest of my life envying people who really do write BOOKS, and become and old, slightly pitiable pain in the ass.
To help face all these fears, I decided to start this blog. I hope it will give me a stimulus to do something every day (at least every other day) to move my GREAT PROJECT forward during what I expect to be the hardest phase, the initial one when I have to be all alone and produce a sample chapter or two of the best writing I can manage, without any editor to harass me or any fee in the offing. I hope the blog will help me organize my thoughts as I go along, an electronic muggle version of the “pensieve” from Harry Potter, and offset my instinct toward secrecy about my work. (My wife found out I was thinking of writing this book via an e-mail argument we were having the other day about money.) In time it may help me reach sources and form a little “community” eagerly anticipating when the BOOK finally comes out and they can read it. (Sure, dream on.)
The blog also doubles as my homework for the first formal education I have received for nearly two decades — a New York University course adult ed. course on “Bridging the Digital Divide,” internet publishing for dead-tree typewriter types like me. What I have learned in the first two classes is that blogging is about integrating design and visuals with text, not just transferring your words into cyberspace. So are print magazines, indeed, but I have stubbornly stuck only to the text part.
I think this is not an accident. Like Gov. David Patterson, I am legally blind, meaning that without glasses I can’t see the big E on the eye chart. Unlike him, thank God, my problem is the shape of the eye, correctible by external lenses that alter the angle of incoming light, not irreparable damage to the optic nerve. So I have lived an entirely “unhandicapped” life. But I have always loathed and dreaded dealing with visual and tactile elements — I still recall the humiliation of making a monstrously misshapen ash tray in second-grade shop class — and loved the refuge of non-visual mental abstraction, from algebra to literature.
Luckily, I have those three internet-age children to help me, maybe. (I admit in advance, I’m a dork.) And maybe it’s time to open my eyes, literally, to the new publishing world, even as I pursue the “old school” dream of my youth. Wish me luck.
