Ok. True confessions time. My motivation for creating this blog comes from the fact that I can be a slacker (not to be confused with being lazy, which I’m not…most days).

But I am undisciplined, sometimes, even about things that I profess to love. In this case, writing.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to “be a writer.” That began in 1st grade with my first, simple, published work, “All about Spring.”

Five things are evident from that writing:

1. I needed to work on my creativity and penmanship, but I was a first grader after all;
2. My fear of birds, which I thought began with a geese attack in pre-school, hadn’t fully materialized yet. I devote a full sentence to those creepy critters;
3. I challenged male-dominated archetypes at an early age, as demonstrated by my unwillingness to profess the Easter Bunny as male or female;
4. I was always the eternal optimist and a poor self-editor. Note the happy, albeit typographical, ending; and
5. I recognized the value of the written word. I carefully placed this laminated, spacer-lined “masterpiece” in my grade-school scrapbook, adjacent to my coveted, although unkempt, Three’s Company sticker collection.

I was a ferocious reader as a kid thanks to my parents’ tradition of reading to go to sleep, which I adopted initially with “Go, Dog, Go” and “The Hungry Caterpillar.” And I longed to be able write as well as the authors of my favorite books, which later became “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” Still, I didn’t set aside time devoted to writing outside of the school-mandated assignments.

In my 20s I became a TV journalist, narrating and telling stories through video (something that I loved), but that effort was work-related. I later transitioned to marketing and public relations, which demanded good, corporate-focused, writing, but hardly the creative outlet that I craved.

Then, I met my friend Greg, a coworker who had authored a book and numerous published articles. One day, when I was bemoaning my desire to be a writer, he declared matter of factly: “Kim, there are plenty of people who say they are writers, and then there are those who actually write.”

He wrote on a daily basis, even if it was for his own eyes. He was disciplined. He was not being an asshole.

I realized that I was all talk and no action. I also recognized that, at the time, I had too many commitments that I placed in front of my self-proclaimed passion to ever be successful.

Now, finally six years later, I feel that I have that flexibility, and I’m dedicating myself to writing several times a week. They may be inane, profound or anywhere in between, but I’m committing myself to posting at least one entry, fiction or non-fiction, to this blog each week in 2014.

We’ll see how the experiment goes. Have you tried something similar, blogging or otherwise? Do you have any suggestions for staying on target? I appreciate your feedback. Cheers! – Kim