Just a quick note here to let y’all know I’m still here.

Plugging away after life threw me a couple curve balls — our Raleigh office closed in April, and they let go pretty much everyone at the office, including me.

So I’ve been job-hunting and networking like a champ since then, which becomes a bit draining after a while. You look at all the jobs, try to narrow them down, and then fill out the online application (some of which can be long and tedious), add a resume and custom cover letter, and hope for the best. Then you start to worry you’re missing the perfect job, so you keep hunting. It becomes a vicious cycle.

But I’ve got some leads, and while I got sidetracked by a job that I (and one of my potential bosses) thought was all but wrapped up in late May, and I’m feeling good about the prospects.

What I haven’t been doing is writing fiction. I tried to keep up with the novel in April after the lay-off, then by May I was knee-deep in job applications and creating some (pretty awesome, if I say so myself) writing samples for potential jobs. But I wasn’t working on my novel.

I wrote all of 1,800 words on my current novel in May. That’s just 6 pages. In a month. Bleh.

So for my birthday I decided to challenge myself: I will write 500 words a day, minimum, every day.

If this is my dream — to be a full-time fiction writer — then I need to keep on writing, despite what distractions are going on in my world.

On Saturday, my birthday, I got up early and got back in touch with my characters in Hunter’s Moon, the sequel to my novel Family, Pack.

And I wrote about 600 words. Sunday I wrote about 700 more. And yesterday, even though it was a crazy day, I squeezed in another 600 words (a car chase scene, woo!).

Which leaves me with today. I just wrote about 350 words on this blog post, which could’ve been used on my novel — I could’ve finished up that car chase. What was I thinking?

And so the challenge continues! Wish me luck, and thanks for reading!