I spent the year behind on deadlines and everything else. It's only now in December that I feel even slightly caught up. 2016 has to be better.

I'm sure other writers have no difficulties writing nice.

I continued blogging, but between illness and deadlines, did not manage to blog nearly as much as last year. I'm hoping to do better in 2016.

Lungs, they do not like to be messed with. I give pneumonia one star and that's for the silent p.

Some worked in collaboration with each other to produce comics as well as short stories.I was partnered with Anita Roy. We critiqued each other's stories. Hers is a corker: future Masterchef. I chortled. There's not a single dud in Eat the Sky.

Sure, Malcolm Turnbull is less anti-science and anti-culture than [Tony] Abbott, but low bar, and there's not a lot to show for it beyond rhetoric.

I decided to read something I normally hate: a cosy mystery. You know one of those mysteries where everything is tidily wrapped up at the end and everyone lives happily ever after? An Agatha Christie kind of mystery. They are so not my thing. But then someone was raving about Barbara Neely's Blanche White books and they sounded interesting.