revenge scheme so convoluted and messy it's painfully obvious to anyone who knows anything that you never actually wanted revenge and are just crashing out real bad
Writing advice #?: Have your characters wash the dishes while they talk.
This is one of my favorite tricks, picked up from E.M. Forester and filtered through my own domestic-homebody lens. Forester says that you should never ever tell us how a character feels; instead, show us what those emotions are doing to a character’s posture and tone and expression. This makes “I felt sadness” into “my shoulders hunched and I sighed heavily, staring at the ground as my eyes filled with tears.” Those emotions-as-motions are called objective correlatives. Honestly, fic writers have gotten the memo on objective correlatives, but sometimes struggle with how to use them.
Objective correlatives can quickly become a) repetitive or b) melodramatic. On the repetitive end, long scenes of dialogue can quickly turn into “he sighed” and “she nodded” so many times that he starts to feel like a window fan and she like a bobblehead. On the melodramatic end, a debate about where to eat dinner can start to feel like an episode of Jerry Springer because “he shrieked” while “she clenched her fists” and they both “ground their teeth.” If you leave the objective correlatives out entirely, then you have what’s known as “floating” dialogue — we get the words themselves but no idea how they’re being said, and feel completely disconnected from the scene. If you try to get meaning across by telling us the characters’ thoughts instead, this quickly drifts into purple prose.
Instead, have them wash the dishes while they talk.
To be clear: it doesn’t have to be dishes. They could be folding laundry or sweeping the floor or cooking a meal or making a bed or changing a lightbulb. The point is to engage your characters in some meaningless, everyday household task that does not directly relate to the subject of the conversation.
This trick gives you a whole wealth of objective correlatives. If your character is angry, then the way they scrub a bowl will be very different from how they’ll be scrubbing while happy. If your character is taking a moment to think, then they might splash suds around for a few seconds. A character who is not that invested in the conversation will be looking at the sink not paying much attention. A character moderately invested will be looking at the speaker while continuing to scrub a pot. If the character is suddenly very invested in the conversation, you can convey this by having them set the pot down entirely and give their full attention to the speaker.
A demonstration:
1
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
“What?” Drizella continued dropping forks into the dishwasher.
2
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
Drizella paused midway through slotting a fork into the dishwasher. “What?”
3
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
Drizella laughed, not looking up from where she was arranging forks in the dishwasher. “What?”
4
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
The forks slipped out of Drizella’s hand and clattered onto the floor of the dishwasher. “What?”
5
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
“What?” Drizella shoved several forks into the dishwasher with unnecessary force, not seeming to notice when several bounced back out of the silverware rack.
See how cheaply and easily we can get across Drizella’s five different emotions about Anastasia leaving, all by telling the reader how she’s doing the dishes? And all the while no heads were nodded, no teeth were clenched.
The reason I recommend having it be one of these boring domestic chores instead of, say, scaling a building or picking a lock, is that chores add a sense of realism and are low-stakes enough not to be distracting. If you add a concurrent task that’s high-stakes, then potentially your readers are going to be so focused on the question of whether your characters will pick the lock in time that they don’t catch the dialogue. But no one’s going to be on the edge of their seat wondering whether Drizella’s going to have enough clean forks for tomorrow.
And chores are a cheap-n-easy way to add a lot of realism to your story. So much of the appeal of contemporary superhero stories comes from Spider-Man having to wash his costume in a Queens laundromat or Green Arrow cheating at darts, because those details are fun and interesting and make a story feel “real.” Actually ask the question of what dishes or clothing or furniture your character owns and how often that stuff gets washed. That’s how you avoid reality-breaking continuity errors like stating in Chapter 3 that all of your character’s worldly possessions fit in a single backpack and in Chapter 7 having your character find a pair of pants he forgot he owns. You don’t have to tell the reader what dishes your character owns (please don’t; it’s already bad enough when Tolkien does it) but you should ideally know for yourself.
Anyway: objective correlatives are your friends. They get emotion across, but for low-energy scenes can become repetitive and for high-energy scenes can become melodramatic. The solution is to give your characters something relatively mundane to do while the conversation is going on, and domestic chores are not a bad starting place.
I actually first learned this lesson when doing improv. Always have your character doing something, but don’t make the scene about what your character is doing. Come in and start putting groceries away and confront your roommate about sleeping with your boyfriend while you’re putting the groceries away. Be working in a clothes store folding shirts and be reunited with your long-lost cousin while working. Etc etc.
And then much later (partially bc I started writing regularly years after I started doing improv but even then it took me way too long to figure it out) I realized this can be applied to writing, and it’s great. Anytime there’s a long dialogue scene and it feels flat, rewriting it so they’re doing something else - something that on the surface is totally unrelated to the conversation - is a sure-fire way to make it more dynamic and open up whole new avenues for conveying thoughts and feelings to the reader.
My elderly French neighbours are convinced that my partner is known Canadian comedian Mae Martin. I see them in the hallway and they're like “saw your partner on that magazine cover :)” “heard they’re producing a movie oooh we got famous people in the building :)” and I'm like GUYS i have told you before that MY WIFE IS NOT KNOWN CANADIAN COMEDIAN MAE MARTIN!!!! This is the greatest interaction I've ever had in my life!!!!!
what’s the point of giving your character severe trauma if it doesn’t make them an asshole to work with. not in a cute way. they should be a fucking cunt. they have to make problems on purpose. they have to lash out at their friends without even being provoked, just because they’re having a bad day and they want to hurt someone to cope with it. on purpose. they have to want to hurt someone on purpose. they can regret it later, but they can’t just say something mean on accident, it has to be calculated and cruel and so, so intentional.
I honestly think Seb would end up being uk’s Yukio Mishima many years on once the details of his life with Jim eventually come out. personally I think his prose isn’t even that good it’s very Dan brown airport fiction but then there’s a foreword by like Hilary Mantel explaining so this guy killed 600 people and was in a committed relationship with the guy who blew up a quarter of London Enjoy!
I've been playing around a bit with the post-Fif public opinion but frankly haven't managed to work it all out just because it's so bonkers. Can you imagine the horny fanmail he could have gotten in prison (if it hadn't been intercepted and burnt, probably)? The amount of conspiracy theories that must have sprung up around him, all the people who actually still believe he's innocent? (Main reason why they're so very careful to keep him alive, to avoid feeding the conspiracy people even further.) What about the dozens of people he's shagged, some of them very publicly-do they have to post public disavowals just in case anyone suspects them of having been in on it? What happens to the books, do they still get reprints? Are the signed copies being ritually burnt or do they go for insane amounts of money as twisted collectors' items? What the fuck happens with royalties if they do sell them again? Can you imagine his Wikipedia page?
But yeah frankly the idea of the books once the "too soon" period has passed being republished and the context that has to be given there... Brings me joy :)
Saw this when I was in London this summer, I stopped my friend to point at it and said "holy shit it's the statue of Theseus fucking the Minotaur" in the middle of the very busy museum.
This is not a prompt but I am finally reading FiF and the concept of Sebastian being a populist fuck the rich author is so fucking funny to me can you imagine the discourse!! The substacks!!! I bet he gets roasted alive for attending eton!!!! And rhen people are like CLASS TRAITORS ARE IMPORTANT !!!! and then he gets arrested for treason and they’re like hash tag anti-imperial king. and then people are like was he an anti-imperial king when he murdered brown people across an ocean. and then they’re like Excuse You He’s A Queer Elder Actually! and who told you that? My cock in his ass at Brussels I even read his manuscript 🫡.
YES. GOOD. EXACTLY.
You get a little of that in the exchanges with the five would-be terrorist kids but this was definitely a bit where if I had more time and inspiration I would have fleshed it out a lot. Like. He's walking talking discourse bait. He encourages it on purpose. The more he gets talked about the better and by god he's going to make sure there is a hell of a lot to discuss.
TVD & FiF Comparison Using Computational Linguistics
When I opened my inbox back in December 2025 and saw the notification that @pasiphile had published the very first chapter of Fast In Fire, I - like so many others alongside me - was absolutely elated! After all, it had been 12 years since These Violent Delights, the first part of This Life Is A Trip (When You're Psycho In Love), had been published, dutifully offering a gateway into mormor for many, and stealing hearts right, left and center.
As a fan of pasi's writing and with my first semester at uni studying computational linguistics under my belt, the 12 year gap piqued my interest in particular. How would the writing differ? Would you be able to spot differences in regards to the average word or sentence length?
All that accumulated into me asking pasi for permission to analyze their texts, and then went to code. This post now aims to share/document the findings of this endeavor.
Disclaimer: The findings may be a tiny bit inaccurate - while I am absolutely having fun and enjoying this project immensly, I am still very new to this skill set,,
That being said, the findings are as follows:
TVD Word Count: ~168,318
*is slightly inaccurate due to a process of tokenization - which consists of splitting a text into its several parts (e.g. "Sebastian's boss doesn't smoke. -> "Sebastian", "'s", "boss", "does", "n't", "smoke") - beforehand -- I needed to work around having multiple tokens that made up one word (e.g. how "doesn't" is one word but is made up of "does" and "n't"), which I tried my best to account for but some tokens may still slip past
TVD Average Word Length: ~4.25 characters/word
FIF Word Count: ~365,069 words
FIF Average Word Length: ~4.39 characters/word
TVD Sentence Count: ~18,926 sentences
TVD Average Sentence Length: ~8.89 words/sentence
FIF Sentence Count: ~42,250.5 sentences *the .5 possibly stems from a forgotten quotation mark
FIF Average Sentence Length: ~8.64 words/sentence
-> This indicates a slight change in sentence length, with TVD having slightly longer sentences on average than FIF
The fics TVD (11,268 tokens) & FiF (19,031 tokens) have this many tokens in common: 7,493
The fics have an overlap of 24.73%
The Type Token Ratio for TVD (0.05) and for FIF (0.04)
*The Type Token Ratio (TTR) refers to how versatile a text is in its choice of words. It compares the complete Tokens (as already mentioned above) of a text with the overall Types in a text, which basically mean the occurrence of one unique Token [e.g. "Sebastian's boss doesn't like Sebastian's cigarettes" -> the types "Sebastian" and "'s" occur 2x, every other type exactly 1x; the overall sentence has 9 Tokens but 7 Types]. The closer the TTR is to 0, the more variety a text has to offer.
-> The TTR for both TVD and FiF are very close to 0, which is an indicator for their varied choice of words. However, FiF has a minisculy larger TTR, but this can be chalked up to its length being so much bigger than TVD. I'd say TVD and Fif are overall pretty varied with ca. equal levels of different choice of words.
Most frequently used Tokens:
TVD: TOKENS - FREQ | FIF: TOKENS - FREQ
1 you - 9,953 | the - 14,439
2 the - 6,651 | you - 11,791
3 and - 5,205 | to - 8,857
4 he - 4,401 | a - 7,885
5 to - 4,051 | and - 7,564
.. … …
96 how - 268 | head - 661
97 hands - 267 | some - 647
98 way - 264 | looked - 641
99 right - 263 | into - 641
100 want - 263 | Moriarty - 639
-> Note how the ranking of "you" and "the" switches places from TVD to FiF,,, that was so funny to me.
Most frequently used Bigrams:
*A Bigram means a Token Grouping of 2 that occur right next to each other in a text. "Sebastian killed him", for example, would consist out of the Bigrams "Sebastian killed" and "killed him".
TVD: BIGRAMS - FREQ | FIF: BIGRAMS - FREQ
. “ - 3,475 | . “ - 8,179
. ” - 2,220 | . ” - 6,621
You 're - 1,818 | ” “ - 6,178
? ” - 1,480 | ? ” - 4,087
” “ - 1,399 | , ” - 2,490
.. … …
96 again , - 142 | Sherlock said - 294
97 for a - 140 | he 'd - 293
98 there 's - 139 | you 've - 291
99 one of - 139 | ” he - 291
100 back . - 139 | “ Yeah - 291
-> Particularly interesting to me is the frequency of ” “, which marks how often a closing quotation mark was followed by an opening one. Or: how often was a quote directly followed with another quote without any dialoge markers?
Most frequently used pronouns:
TVD: PRONOUN - FREQ | FIF: PRONOUN - FREQ
you - 9,953 | you - 11,791
he - 4,401 | it - 6,257
your - 3,182 | I - 5,898
it - 2,823 | he - 5,263
his - 2,425 | she - 4,533
-> Note how the existance of white hat chapters is clearly noticable in the pronoun frequency - especially with "she" making it into the Top 5 :')
Honorable Mentions:
In the overall Token frequency, in TVD "Jim" came in 26th place (Freq.: 916), which just happens to be lower than the frequency of "Sherlock" in FiF - with 2,087 mentions, it took 25th place… I know Jim's fuming over that somewhere lmao
"men", "sex" & "bedroom" all share one place with 55 mentions, and "fucking", "gun" & "home" all share one place with 54 mentions - if that isn't mormor in a nutshell, I don't know what else is haha
When I grouped the words into word classes, "Jim" took the first place of the TVD nouns with a frequency of 916 occurrences; a mention of "Moriarty", however, occurs 237 times and takes 7th place.
The first 3 most frequent nouns in FiF were Sherlock (Freq.: 2,084), Mary (Freq.: 1,146) and John (Freq.: 1,014).
Moran is mentioned 722 times (-> he's in 5th place) and Moriarty takes the 9th place with being mentioned 632 times.
The really interesting thing to me (and I'm absolutely not saying this to make you actually do this, it's already such a massive work!) would be to compare the seb-chapters in fif to tvd, given that they're about the same length and written from the same pov. There's still a whole lot more introspection than interaction, I reckon (I remember struggling with that in the first few chapters) so I do wonder what kind of effect that had.
Another thing is that I got the impression my writing has become a bit less diverse, so it's funny seeing that reflected in the tiny difference in repetitive text.
I also noticed the bigram quotation thing, even before I read your comment! I do feel like I often write a lot of dialogue without dialogue tags (the "he said"s etc), more than average, so it's not surprising to see it ranked that high.
And finally, everything about the nouns & names frequency is hilarious. Like the fact that "Sherlock" has almost double the frequency of the second most frequent noun? Very in character. Also with the "Moriarty" and "Jim" thing in tvd, given that he doesn't get to be Jim in Sebastian's pov until chapter 5 of 11, that sort of reflects in that ratio. Very pleasing to me.
this may be deemed a hot take but it needs to be said:
out of all 7000+ languages in the world, there is not a SINGLE one that doesn't deserve to be protected. from english to the languages on the brink of complete extinction. from the north pole to the south pole. the right to speak or learn your native/heritage language is a human right, regardless of what country you're from or what your opinions are. there is no language that is 'better' than another and i will fight tooth and nail to make sure that as many languages and dialects as possible are preserved until my final breath.
the death of a language is the death of millions of voices throughout history. a language goes extinct every two weeks, and it's alarming how few people are concerned about that on this site.
Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame. [...] There is a bomb inside you. I can say that. It might be true but it might not be definitive. The Dali Lama says we are born in bliss and Jesus says we are born in sin. Who are you going to believe?
The Definitive Version by Richard Siken
In the Lord's year of 2026, I am outing myself as a Moran and Moriarty gal because there is nothing a bullet loves more than a finger on the trigger--and Jack O'Connell was really the only choice for Dónal Finn's Moriarty.
“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”
— Matthew Walker PhD, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
(via themedicalstate)
i love translators’ notes. i love seeing a little footnote that’s like “compare my good and grass-touching translation to the STUPID translations of smith and johnson, who rendered the passage ‘xyz’ because their heads are so far up their ass they’re giving ouroboroses body dysmorphia” or “this sentence isn’t translated very well, but that’s because the author wasn’t making any FUCKING sense”
Symbiosis isn't just mutualism. Parasitism is symbiosis. It's uncomfortable to confront parasitic relationships if you want to see your human ideas of good and bad reflected in Nature.
But gazing into something huge and utterly Other, being uncomfortable means you're engaging your mind with it. "Uncomfortable" is actually a whole spectrum of emotions that become a vivid and satisfying rainbow.
There was a post a while back with some artwork of Dendrogaster, a crustacean that parasitizes starfish, and its body is like this branching fractal of fleshy lobes made to fit inside the body of the starfish mirroring its structure, and I was absolutely horrified to look at this, and this horror was the same emotion as a strangely visceral wave of sympathy for this parasite.
Creative works about parasites often invoke the horror of bodily invasion, which is visceral and strong for me, but this artwork inverted that horror, instead showing the horror of being made so perfectly for fitting within someone else that you lose everything you are and become unrecognizable.
I also think of the post about the cowbird chick. It's awful that the bird pushes its siblings out of the nest as it grows, and the mama feeds it because she instinctively must feed her chick, but the cowbird is just a baby. Was it wrong for him to hatch, to be alive, to be hungry, to be a baby and to need love?
Symbiosis is intensely beautiful, and sometimes it's beautiful because it's grotesque and terrible. Of course, the symbiosis between two organisms isn't an allegory for a relationship, it just is a relationship, but looking at the way organisms become entwined feels like you're seeing things that, if words described them, would also be human experiences.
Being invaded by a parasite is a horror of powerlessness and loss of autonomy, but being a parasite is also defined by powerlessness. In many cases, the parasite will die without the host, but the host can live without the parasite. I wonder why it is expected to sympathize with one and not the other.
Your immune system fights against internal parasites like a tapeworm...Imagine being a tapeworm. The body of your host is your universe. Do you find your world to be kind? Benevolent? Does your god love you?
Sometimes people call disabled people "parasites." When I think about my future sometimes I'm uncertain and afraid.
But when a rare non-photosynthetic orchid blooms in the forest, this is not the forest's weakness and failure, but its crowning glory.
hobbits were the peak of civilization in tolkien verse. jobs were Gardening, Stall At The Farmer’s Market, or Mailman. Shoes OFF, capris ON, 6 meals a day, high and fat as all shit. Names like Daddy Twofoot….why the fuck are we horny for elves
It's spring now which means the kids in my city have started drawing hopscotches on the sidewalk and as a rule I do every hopscotch I see because 1. Use it or lose it (ability to scotch) and 2. If a child got down on the hardscrabble streets of Boston Massachusetts to draw a scotch the least I can do is use it, but in doing the hopscotches, I've learned that about 50% of them are the typical 8-10 step scotch and the other 50% are. Somewhat avant-garde. And of course I'm not vetting the entire scotch before I start it so sometimes it's like haha 8 steps woo! Childlike whimsy! And sometimes they're 20 steps or 30 or they've got a section with three squares instead of two where you have to do a little Charleston to step on all three, or, memorably, FORTY one foot squares. A full BLOCK of jumping on one foot but I'm no quitter so once I've started Jigsaw Junior's fuckin hopscotch gauntlet I'm there til the end just a daily pot smoker in her thirties jumping kasa-obake style through an affluent suburb while some little proto-kennedy watches from his bedroom window rubbing his sadistic little third grade hands together and cackling. It's amazing. I love spring.
sick of hearing about "healing crystals" that "cleanse your mind and body of negative energy" i want to know which rocks can hurt you and fuck up your vibe so bad
everyone suggesting uranium isn't wrong but anyone who said "literally any rock if you're willing to resort to violence" are the only people who can get on my level. you're hired.
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
2087
titsay
gummygunk
annaxmalina
ellievsbear
blakekathryn
