So, I’ve taken a break from Science Fiction Weekly for awhile. This weekend was spent working on both Fantasy Short Stories Book Four and Alien Dimensions #19, as well as a short story that has been running around in my head for awhile. I’ll make a separate post for it soon.

Yes, finally back to writing. It feels great! But a bit difficult to keeping ploughing on with when there’re bushfires, flooding, a coronavirus, and other personal issues happening.

For those freaking out about the coronavirus, just to put things in perspective, Malaria kills half a million people every year. If we’re talking diseases generally, 10 million people die from heart attacks every year. As the coronavirus is just another flu, almost 100,000 people die from the flu just in the USA every year. With 327 million people, that’s about 0.0003%. Extrapolating that, at least 2 million people die of the flu every year on the planet. Probably a lot more than that in less healthy areas. That’s on top of all the other diseases. So, unless we start getting figures of the coronavirus killing more than 2 million people, it isn’t worthy of the panic that it seems to be creating.

Note that the WHO has not declared it a worldwide emergency yet.

For those of us who’ve heard this all before, this is just another SARS / Bird Flu / Swine Flu / media advertising revenue generator. Exercise, eat healthily (Mediterranean diet?), stay positive, and if you get it and you don’t have any other underlying health conditions, it’ll just be another flu.

Of course, if you get a cough you should get medical advice from a trained professional! Don’t trust the ramblings of a depressed science fiction writer!

I’m getting out of my slump thanks to Doctor Who, Avenue 5 and Star Trek: Picard. How wonderful that 2020 is going to be the golden year for science fiction streaming. Loved the spy eps and Tesla ep of Doctor Who, the satire of Avenue 5, and the heartbreaking nostalgia of Star Trek: Picard. Definitely looking forward to all the shows coming out this year.

Not sure if everyone is going to get Avenue 5’s humour though. One of my favourite scenes:

Mia: “What are you so happy about?”
Matt: “I’m a nihilist”
Mia: “No you’re not.”
Matt: “Whatever!”
Mia: “Oh my God.”

Improves with repeated viewing.

In any case, there’s been some great writing in these series and I can see some Hugo nominations happening in early 2021, if everyone remembers!

In other news, I’ve come to the painful conclusion that I’ll have to delay writing the Robots of Atlantis for a while. I might have time to do a bit more of it in May with the plan to finish it by October. We’ll see.

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