#probablynotfred

Oh, words to describe my bafflement! Terms of endearment never made sense to me. In my country, a very popular one is essentially the same word our localized version of Gollum uses for his precious, which I've always found pretty disturbing. At the very least, it's not gender-dependent, but still... Why would anyone want to call one's partner an object, or an infant, or other things; don't they want to learn their partner's names?

Ha, it does sound weird with the Gollum comparison but I imagined someone calling their romo partner that way and I snorted.

probablynotfred replied to your post “Hallo, Aro #4: Lucky”

Note to self, really need to remember to find time to read your longer works, I love your writing style and that it's low on visuals and full of movement and feels streamlined, like there's only as many words as are necessary (don't know how else to describe it).

I’m not sure I can tell you how much this means to me (although I’ll try).

I don’t think I’ve said it here, but the Hallo, Aro series is a challenge to myself: to write a story in a thousand words or less, absolutely no exceptions. For a reflective story about a single scene or feeling, it’s easier; for a story moving through a fairy-tale repeat-scene structure with some sense of character and reflection, it’s harder. I spend more time figuring out what words to keep than I do putting words on the page.

By nature I’m kind of the reverse: still low on visuals (I have prosopagnosia and aphantasia, so I have no ability to remember faces or visualise in my head) but gleefully wording to describe thought, feeling, movement and speech. Autism always gives me a focus on how people move through a scene, but my longer works are not as pared back because I’m not trying to work to a limit.

(I was the kind of person who’d always go over the word limit for assignments and fudge the numbers to hide how far over I’d gone. I never got called out on it, so I suppose what I wrote was interesting enough that the teachers weren’t counting words! They set uppermost limits for assignments for a reason, though, and I struggled with it. If folks have read any of my posts here, ever, I don’t think this is a surprise.)

I’m finding it an interesting experiment. Sometimes it’s frustrating to have to sift so carefully through words in trying to tell a story that feels longer than my word limit. I have to think on what‘s essential and then how to prioritise what best fleshes the bones of the story in the rest of the allotted space. While I don’t think I’m always choosing correctly, and I do wonder what some of these pieces may look like given 1500 or 2000 words to tell the same story, it’s a good challenge. And I hope it’ll benefit the rest of my writing as I get better at it.

(Plus it means that I can post more stories more regularly that don’t require so much time investment from other people. I think that’s good?)

This said, I’ve never submitted a writing assignment that didn’t have describe more in the feedback, so I’m always thrilled to find a kindred soul on the subject of not needing to know what things look like!

There wasn't a timeframe given for the spending, it's differing for me per game. Mobile games -- budget of 5€/month max. Path of Exile -- unnecessary, but every few years I drop how many €'re the equivalent of 50$ at the time. If it's of relevance, games like PoE that are F2P-friendly and respect their players are more likely to see my money, too. (Also, I'm excited to see game stuff here, game dev is sadly just a hobby for now but I'm planning on a master's one day too)

Oops, I guess I should have been clearer. It was meant as, over the “lifetime” of the game, like from day 1 of playing till now or the last day. I’ll try and use precisions like that to add a bit of nuance (there’s a “limitations” part in any study, and the comments I’m seeing are great for that)