Wow, you just made my year -- thank you so much!! I appreciate, and value, such flattering and insightful and well-articulated feedback (you're a mighty effective writer yourself).
Thank you!! I've been a reader and very casual hobbyist writer for a lot of my life, and I've felt the importance of a good review, so when a book or story catches my interest I'm always trying to keep the reasons in my mind so I can leave a detailed review. That wasn't the detailed version of my reaction to your stories, though. After giving some of them a re-read I can mention other things.
* The way you capture each tickling you've experienced in the kind of granular moment-to-moment detail that really shows the way each teasing word, each new touch or change in technique, takes up your whole mind while it's happening to you. I know you mentioned there's paraphrasing and writing tweaks, and maybe there's also the subtle embellishment that happens over time to often-revisited memories, but these stories come across as really authentic.
* The way you remember each tickler you've had with (usually!) some fondness and (always) some interest in their personalities, getting into each person's different approach to life in general and tickling in particular. (Your wife is such a cute tickler in these stories! If I had the boldness to tickle people I honestly think I might do it more that way most of the time.)
* Your thing for women's hands and arms and arm hair(!) is relatable and endearing because, like a lot of women, I like those same things on men, but it adds to the distinctiveness of your stories because I haven't seen a man with that perspective before, and I enjoy that you provided that detail that you might have thought was missing in other people's tickle stories.
* The use of ambiguity and subtext in your conversations with the therapist so each innocent thing she says is buzzing with tension - or
seems to be! And speaking of subtext - the classy way you can describe all this and completely avoid admitting you enjoy this torture (or at least the memory of it?) enough to be hanging out on the Tickling Media Forum.
I do enjoy writing but I can't even get organized enough to make regular contributions on this forum so I can't even imagine what it would take to sit down and, like, write a novel or something. Or even a haiku
Same! After all this time, still the longest piece of fiction I've ever actually completed was the 65-page story about talking dinosaurs that I wrote as a preteen.
. So thanks again for taking the time and trouble to engage -- great to have another tickler in my circle, especially one who's conveniently out of reach!
Hahaha, and conveniently shy-fingered, but I do have dreams.
😀