New skills and latent talents

For the first half of the first year out I tried to bring my (software) development skills up to date.
That turned out to be much too hard, largely because it had been too long - eight years - since I had been active writing code.
When I turned to blogging and active in-person networking it became clear that there were skills available that didn't fit my initial view of what I needed to do to get a job.
I love to write.
What got me going was National Novel Writing Month.  Every November a few hundred thousand people make a commitment to write a fifty thousand word draft of a novel.  I've tried it three times now.  I have never come close to that many words but it has helped me a lot because the premise of the exercise is that no one will read what we write.  It's only a rough draft.  For one month, we just write as much as we can with no attempt to edit or evaluate the results.  When it's done, we can look back and decide what to do with it.
I was able to do create some daring scenes, things that just barely made sense.  And it freed me up to the point where I could write every day, from the top of my head, for at least a few paragraphs that did make sense.  Almost all of my writing since November is now published in this blog.  I'm happy with it.  I've always been pretty good at writing even in the years that most of what I wrote was short emails.  I've wanted to write a novel for a long time and I'll try again in November.