Once Upon a Word...

A word.  A thought.  A single piece of information.  And now it grows, expands and begins to take on a life of its own.
Many people are beginning 2014 with coming up with "a word".  What is your word for 2014?  And as I've been reflecting, I think my word for 2014 is just that: word.
Words are the heart of everything: communication, information, feeling, story, understanding.  Most importantly for me, they are the building blocks of stories.  I've spent a lifetime reading words and sharing words; now I want to create with them.
It's always been a (an un-articulated) dream of mine to be a writer.  In fact, after I was scared away from engineering, that way my second career choice.  I wanted to write for television.  I have a vivid memory of watching the Emmy awards one year and commenting how one day I'd be on that stage accepting an award for my writing.  The reaction I received was scoff.  Do you have any idea how hard that is?  Instantly scared away from that...  Then it was psychologist and eventually I settled into education where I've lived for  over a decade now (not including college, but that would make me sound old!)  And I've been happy.
But that little voice, itch, ambition; call it what you may, has started up again.  There has been this yearning for something more.  For a while, I thought it was move-up in education into a leadership role.  And I've done that too -- heading committees, volunteering and mentoring.  Each of those has been rewarding, but hasn't satisfied that itch.  Then I began my New Year's Tradition of reading Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project (well, completion I should say as I've never quite finished the book...).  I got to her chapter about work and she details how she made the jump from the legal world to the world of writing.  It was scary, she thought she'd fail.  But she did it as is very successful.
It was then that the seed in the back of my mind began to germinate.  It was seed that had been planted all those years ago in school when I wanted to write for television.  But over the years and through the tumbling of experience the seed has changed.  Its less of an "I'm going to win an Emmy," seed and more of a "I want to write" seed.  I'm still tossing around ideas of what I'd like to write.  I have a few ideas that I'm still teasing out, but figured a blog is the best (and cheapest) place to start.  I can test myself here to see if I have the discipline to write on a schedule, ask others for feedback and just get back that joy that I get for writing.  Even if this just turns out to be just for the joy of writing, it'll be well worth it.
Please leave comments, feedback and ideas you might like to read about below (even if we are "real life" friends).  I will do my best to respond to comments here or via email.