My would-be, might-be book-to- be is a biography of a Russian businessman (Russian Jewish actually, which is significant) named Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Named Who What? The literary agent I am hoping to work with told me it sounds like a grea idea except for two things: No one has heard of me, and no one (in America) has heard of Khodorkovsky. Being that Hillary Clinton could not remember the one-syllable-shorter surname of Russia’s new president (“President Med-Whatever, It’s a pleasure to meet you!”), I hear what the agent is saying.

So let me start with him. Mr. Khodor-Whatever was a chemistry graduate student in the late 1980s who couldn’t get into the PhD. program he wanted because he was Jewish (maybe), so took up business instead. By 2003 he controlled one of the world’s largest oil companies, Yukos, and a paper fortune of $15 billion. Investment bankers swarmed around him like lapdogs. He was flying his private jet between Moscow and Houston negotiating to sell a third or so of Yukos to ExxonMobil. He was flying to China to plan the first Russo-Chinese oil pipeline. Both of these actions would have changed the course of energy history and Russian history. He was not yet 40.

By the end of 2004, he was shipped off for a nine-year term in prison camp a few thousand miles past the end of the world in Russia’s Far East. Bureaucrats took over Yukos and resold it on the stock market for $9 billion or so. The same invest bankers swarmed around them like lapdogs. (Do lapdogs swarm actually? Yo get the point.)

People who came into close contact with Khodorkovsky describe him variously as a visionary, a patriot, a naive young man, a thief, a murderer, and a devil in the flesh. The holders of all these opinions are friends of mine whom I deeply respect.

He is still not yet 45. Just in the past few weeks I have heard knowledgeable people opine that he might get out soon, or they might kill him in prison. One of the biggest investors in Russia told me last week this is a book that needs to be written. A friend in Moscow today prophesied, only half joking I hope, that I could make a million dollars. But are you interested yet, dear anonymous reader?

First, we all agreed, I have to think up some way around that long Russian name in the title.

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.

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