Tonight we watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which I’d been wanting to watch since it first came out in 2019. We’d seen the other movies in the rebooted Godzilla franchise: Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island, so it was inevitable that we’d see this one. Now we’re all ready to watch Kong Vs. Godzilla when that one comes out next month.

I had listened to an episode of the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast this morning which talked about kaiju movies, and which suggested that, just as the original Gojira was an allegory for the US bombing of Japan in the Second World War, these modern films can be seen as an allegory for climate change. I think this is pretty clear. Or, rather, it’s sledged into us with a sledgehammer. It’s an important message.

On the whole, I liked the movie. I think Jennifer has been less impressed with them than I have.

Speaking of kaiju, I went into the office earlier this evening to hang with the kittens and get pictures. I didn’t get very many. In fact, I only got one that I liked. It’s this one:

This is Misdemeanor poking her head into the tower track toy that they like. Sometimes they will put their whole body in, with just their butt and tail sticking out, and I really wanted that picture but alas the kittens weren’t cooperating. It’s an okay picture. Slightly blurry. The lighting in the office is difficult to work with, but I applied the native “enhance” filter that made it all look slightly less yellow. Enh. Let me know what you think.

In other news, I’ve submitted twenty-five stories this year so far. I’ve gotten eleven rejections so far: nine form rejections, and two personal. A personal rejection is nice, because it generally means it’s made it past the slush team into the hands of an editor. Still, I have fourteen outstanding. I’m aiming for one hundred rejections this year.

Okay, that’s oversimplifying things. Obviously, I want to sell stories so I can make some money off this fiction writing thing. But I got a wee bit of flack on social media; one correspondent commented that if they got that many rejections they would stop and assess their entire writing process, because it meant they were doing something wrong. I disagree with that assessment; there are a lot of stories out there, a lot of writers, and not that many well-paying markets.

Besides, I took 2020 off completely from submitting anything, reassessing my entire fiction output, and that did me no good at all. Well, I did submit one story to a writing contest, but got a standard “didn’t even make it to the next round” letter.

Shooting for 100 rejections doesn’t mean I really want to damage my ego anymore than it already is. It really means 100+ submissions, assuming that at least one of those submissions ends in a sale.

Here’s hoping.

Daily kitten pics for Thingadailies!