My course did not stop even for Christmas. I had an online quiz to complete by the end of Christmas Day, and I got the results when it ticked over into Boxing Day.

I am currently doing News and Politics, a journalism subject, through Griffith Uni and Critical Thinking at Macquarie. I am doing well in the latter. For the former, I worry that my latest assignment wasn’t very good.

I did not have an end-of-year “best of” science fiction for last year as it would not have been very comprehensive. I hardly saw any films and I only finished reading one novel. It was a pretty average year for science fiction movies anyway, with Arrival probably being the pick of the bunch. I think the very ordinary last Star Trek movie might end the franchise for a while.

I watched a bit of small-screen science fiction. Westworld was easily the best, with immense production values, multiple plot lines and a Sixth Sense type of revelation at the end of series one. I am surprised more people are not talking about it because, to me, it is science fiction of Battlestar Galactica quality. Other series I enjoyed were Class, Dark Matter, Killjoys, Orphan Black, Wayward Pines, and Mars (a very good doco-drama).

I did very little writing last year, just a few minutes of writing on nearly every day so I could continue to call myself a writer. Currently, I am about a third of the way through the second draft of a novel manuscript, Branded.

So far this year my writing and reading has failed to pick up. Perhaps one day I will write for an hour or so, and that night I will pick up a book and read for half an hour, and then do the same the next day, and the next, until it becomes a habit.