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keepcalmandwritefiction · 3 months

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A cool thing about writing is that the better you get at it, the more you're aware of what you want out of it, which means it gets harder, which means you actually feel like you're getting worse.

And by "cool thing," I mean "what the fuck, man"

– Sam Sykes

#fiction #fiction writing #writing motivation #the writer life #sam sykes #tweet tweet #kcawf original #image description in alt text #writeblr

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haveyoureadthiscomic-poll · 2 months

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#brave chef brianna #sam sykes #boom box #boom comics #boom studios #boom! studios #boom! comics #boom! box #indie comic #indie comics #poll

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falinaoftoussaint · 3 months

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#Sam Sykes #the skull #mine #Valentine’s Day #valentines day

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coffeebooksorme · 2 years

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Books gave everything and asked nothing more than to be taken care of.

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literatureaesthetic · 1 year

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haul & the book i just finished <3

'hell bent' was such a fun time, and i can definitely see myself rereading before the year is up. i'm obsessed with Alex, a new fav character for sure!!

and i just received the books on the left, both second hand 🫶🏼 very excited to get to them!!

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gunkreads · 1 year

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I'm about 150 pages in to Seven Blades in Black by Sam Sykes and I don't think I've ever read anything quite like this. It kind of feels like if Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis fused, transed their gender, and got punted into a dark fantasy universe. Like... Sal is a cowboy, in the most American mythological sense of the word, and THAT is the only thing keeping the book's badass levels from spilling over and becoming cringe. Maybe I just like cowboys. Maybe I should read some actual westerns.

#seven blades in black #sam sykes

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mrkltpzyxm · 1 year

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"The Reluctant Hero" trope, updated for jaded suburban step dad (I know it says godson, but I just get a stepdad vibe) is so satisfying.

"Listen sport. I know you think that nightmare dimensions are all fun and games because you read about the adventures that your parents had around the time when you were born. But don't forget that the only reason that book doesn't drain your vital essence away to fuel its unholy geas for corruption of the mortal realms is that your father sacrificed himself to have that one specific nightmare dimension bound into a Necronomicon made from his own corpse. Heck. If you hadn't been conceived during their last desperate escape from that nightmare world then you probably wouldn't even be shielded from its dark enervation by the Blood Aegis you inherited from him."

"You've gotta understand that your Blood Aegis only protects you in parallel realities that share at least three cognitive border planes across the metaphysical void of unknowing. You can't just keep wandering into the basement hellmouth unprotected."

"The treaty that your mother tricked them into signing isn't perfect. They can still find ways to temporally bind your conciousness to an endless maze that doesn't *technically* harm you while releasing a doppleganger in your place to do Arzimetnor knows what until *I* figure out a way to break you free of your eternal wandering."

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to yell at you. I'm not angry. I know this is a lot to put on a ten year old, but you really had me worried this time. And you have NO IDEA how hard it is to get infernal ichor out of denim."

#Sam Sykes #William #Hellmouth

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sushi-roll-x · 2 years

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#life #learning to recover #life is hard #cackling darkly #drinking in your foes despair #funny tweets #sam sykes #healing #monstrosity

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cyborgamazon · 1 year

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I just finished the Grave Of Empires trilogy by Sam Sykes and I found it to be vaguely unsatisfying. I must scream.

Spoilers ahead, you have been warned.

Sal and Liette just leaving New Vigil like that doesn’t make any goddamn sense. New Vigil is described as...well, shitty. Half finished. Rough. But it’s better than anywhere else in the Scar!! Where else are they going to find somewhere out from under the boots of the Imperium and Revolution? Didn’t both of them fantasize about settling down somewhere? New Vigil is the best place for it. It’s not Revolutionary, it’s not Imperial, and not subject to the whims of either. And it’s one of the only places where Sal actually felt welcomed? Cavric did not hate her. Cavric was not angry at her. Cavric offered her his help.

And it’s not even safe yet! The war is not over! They won this battle but do you really think the Great General is going to look at a six digit casualty report and think “Oh wow, I guess I should leave New Vigil alone?” NO! He’s going to escalate. He’s going to build an even bigger army with even more fuck off war machines and he’s going to throw them at New Vigil until it falls.

The Empress is no different. The fact that she just lost a Prodigy to that place will only anger her. She will build up another army of Mages and throw them at New Vigil until it falls.

And now the only two (three, if you count the magic talking gun) people capable of holding them back are just leaving? I’m not sure if Sal can ever actually use The Cacaphony again, but even the threat of something that could kill a Scrath and a Prodigy in less than two minutes would enough to keep the Empire and the Revolution wary. But once news gets out that that threat is no longer present? Goodbye New Vigil.

Speaking of Scraths...Culven Loyal was Strongest. The Seeing God was Wisest. Eldest was Eldest. Strongest appeared in the third book and got eaten by The Cacaphony but where the fuck did Wisest go? He also wanted Eldest, but apparently he just gave up after Book 2?

And...The Lady Merchant is a fucking Scrath? Hello? This was heavily hinted at.

Book 2, page 632, Culven Loyal/Strongest: “All that we sacrificed for *her*, all that we were denied, this land bleeds.”

Book 3, page 648, Culven Loyal/Strongest: “Eldest, Strongest, Cleverest-all of us gave up our bodies to be free of pain, like Mother. And like Mother, we missed it.” (Side note, who the fuck is Cleverest? Is that supposed to be Wisest and the author just misremembered? Or was there a 4th Scrath that I don’t remember?)

The Scraths crave emotion. Pain and suffering in particular, it seems. And what does The Lady Merchant take from Mages in return for their power? Their emotions. Their breath. Their time. Their blood. Their control of their body. All things that a Scrath would crave. The Lady Merchant set up an entire system of magic in order to feed her craving for emotions.

It felt like the book was leading up to some kind of grand revelation where everyone suddenly realized “HOLY SHIT the source of all our power, of the Imperium’s power, is a fucking soul sucking demon!” And then it just...didn’t? The book hints at it but nobody fucking acknowledges it. They just gloss over it. This is a revelation that could shatter the Imperial Throne and plunge the Empire into chaos but nothing comes of it.

I loved the trilogy and I hope Sal and Liette get to ride off into the sunset and settle down and wake up in each others’ arms in silk sheets after a night of good whiskey and better sex, but I do find this ending unsatisfying with all these loose ends.

#Sam Sykes #grave of empires #sal the cacaphony #spoilers #seven blades in black #three axes to fall #ten arrows of iron

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libraryofbaxobab · 1 year

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Video Captions after the break:

Welcome to the Library of Baxobab! I'm your humble library assistant if you have any questions. If you do not have any questions, please see the information desk where a question will be provided for you.

Today I want to talk about this trilogy: the Grave of Empires by Sam Sykes because I finished it last night, and... oh it's so good. (At least I hope it's a trilogy??) Time may make a fool of me, but I fully believe that he respects his character and his audience enough to know that this story is complete and it doesn't need to become a series; trilogy is good.

If you're worried about spoilers, I'll do my best. I'm not going to say any of the major plot twists or anything but I might say whether or not a plot twist exists, characters get arcs... so fair warning.

So as you can see, Sam Sykes doesn't just write books, Sam Sykes writes bricks. These chonkers are like 700 pages apiece. I decided to give Sam Sykes a try because he's very funny on Twitter. He's always tweeting things about like wizard drugs and "releasing the hostages" every time a book of his is ordered. Very tumblr vibes to be honest. I was very excited for "Seven Blades In Black." I have pre-ordered all three of these for the day that they came out so that I could read them as soon as possible. I highly recommend this whole trilogy for sure.

I love to tell anyone who will listen that I read this book when I was working out a lot. And I had found that I could put my books up on the treadmill where you're supposed to put your phone or whatever. I was hit so hard by the twist in this first book that I quite literally stopped in my tracks. Damn near fell of the treadmill. I was like........ oof slowly sliding backwards from this incredible-- I did not see it coming. That trope gets me every time. I was just so shocked.

And so I'm gonna go into a little bit about the specifics of what the Grave of Empires is about

So the trology's claim to fame is that it's a love letter to JRPGs. Now I like video games ,but I don't play a lot of them and I really don't know a lot about JRPGs. I don't think I've played any. And I still had a wonderful time! People who like Final Fantasy, etc etc, really really appreciate the Easter eggs that are to be found in these books. I frolicked through these blissfully unaware of the references and it's still kicks so much ass. Oh it's so cool! The world building is superb. The characters? A+ character design.

Okay so the protagonist is named Sal the Cacophony. The thing about Sam Sykes is that he's not afraid to get silly and in fact getting silly is the best part. Your inner child would think "Aw that's fucking rad!!" That's in here!

Sal is on a revenge quest. She's got a list of names and a magical gun, and she is here to fuck. shit. up.

There is magic in these books; a lot of characters are mages. And the magical system in this trilogy is horrific and unforgettable. Power is granted through Barters with the Lady Merchant, who appears to be some sort of goddess. Mages have to give up something in order to use their powers, and the something that they give up is very specific and poetic in regard to their powers. I don't want to give too much away, but for one example: There are "Siegemages" but the more they use their powers the more they have to give up their emotions, and eventually mages that use too much of their power find themselves unable to feel at all. .... That's ... so horrible. Something awful to think about in exchange for the use of power. Would you give up all of the thing that you have to give up, even though that power has an expiration date, but the consequences are permanent? Nobody wants to pay that big of a price, and yet in the moment they still flirt with that danger all the time. In battle, it can really get away from someone how much that they accidentally agree to give up. I think there's a lot of subtext that you could get out of that.

The setting is utterly hostile. The characters who live there are very harsh. Sal herself is very harsh, she's prickly, hates everything, she's at war with herself. Meanwhile there are several warring factions out in the world, as well as you know, the usual bandits and rogue mages. (They call them Vagrants!) So you have this very bleak background for what is already kind of a bleak story about revenge but the narrative tone is still silly and absurd. Let me put it this way: Sam Sykes, in a tweet, I believe, said that his method of writing characters is to give them stats as if they are a D&D or an RPG character and then: problems. Put problems in their way, but make them try to solve those problems with their lowest stat. You get this kind of result where shit just goes from chaos to more chaos, cascading. The way that these three have been set up I think the stakes have been just about right.

The thing about series is, you know, you have to make the stakes a little bit higher each time. But once you start getting like seven or eight books in, it starts to be like "okay now this is getting weird" and then... I mean, there are some series that I've been ride or die for about 20 books in, and I'm like "okay this is-- this is ridiculous. We need to... Can somebody calm down please?" This trilogy certainly does not overstay its welcome, and it has a very satisfying closure at the end. I won't say whether it's a good ending or a bad ending; it is a satisfying way to wrap things up.

It's also gay! Sal is, by all rights, bisexual. She does have a female love interest during the sequence of events. But she also has had exes of other genders. Nobody in the world really treats it like a big deal, which is also very cool. So if you'd like a fantasy story in a world that, as far as I can tell, homophobia just kinda didn't exist? This is a great one. You don't have to worry about potentially triggering aspects of 'coming out' or being secretive or illicit. It's not a thing, we don't have to bother with that. These characters have way more interesting problems to deal with, most of them of their own making. There's always something exploding or they're having feelings, or sometimes both at the same time. Yeah she's going to bang that chick or maybe that dude or maybe both, and it's gonna be cool.

I was just so shocked everything made sense I was I was putting things together finally it's also gay sal is by all rights bisexual she does have a female love interest during the sequence of events but she also has had X's of other genders nobody in the world really treats it like a big deal which is also very cool so if you like a fantasy story in a world where you don't have to worry about potentially triggering aspects of coming out or being secret or elicit not a thing we don't have to bother with that these characters have way more interesting problems to deal with most of them of their own making there's either something exploding or they're having feelings or sometimes both the same time

It's not very sexually explicit. There is a love scene in the third one, but it's tasteful. Most of the sexual language in the books are in jokes. The characters that are friends really, like, bust each other's chops.... Eh, people who are enemies too also are just straight up mean to each other. There's a lot of really inventive insults thrown between pretty much every character whether they like each other, love each other, or hate each other, sometimes multiples of those at the same time.

One of my favorite things about each of these individual stories is their framing device. They remind me kind of Dragon Age 2? (That's not a JRPG...) For example in the first one, Sal is in a prison cell and she's telling this whole story to her interrogator. So every couple of chapters we'll come back out of the tale and she'll just antagonize her captors. All of a sudden someone will slam their fists down on the table and be like "That's bullshit!" and she'll be like "Prove it.... Asshole!" Everyone in here is just like, crude as hell and it's great.

But for all of these epic tales to be told by Sal, not only are they in first person in the narration, but they are in the story also told by her. It makes the pacing go really well. None of these feels like 700 pages. Being able to bounce out of the story for a little bit, for mostly comedic relief, it keeps you focused on more than one thing. So none of these ever becomes a slog. I can't necessarily say it's "nonstop action." When Sal comes up to a truly larger-than-life boss battle of a character and they just are mean to each other for a few minutes? Is almost more fun than the descriptions of them doing acrobatics and throwing knives at each other and using their powers and shooting their guns.

I can't help but think about this as a western. All of these in my mind are populated by anime characters, like Trigun. I just hear cowboy music in the back of my mind when I read them. In the best possible way.

Grave of Empires Trilogy. Sam Sykes. A+

Thanks for visiting me in the Library.

#books #library card #libraries #LGBTQ+#bisexual #pansexual #fantasy #dark fantasy #sam sykes #Sal the Cacophony #Seven Blades In Black #Ten Arrows Of Iron #Three Axes To Fall #trilogy

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bookcoversonly · 1 year

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Title: Three Axes to Fall | Author: Sam Sykes | Publisher: Orbit (2022)

#books #Three Axes to Fall #Sam Sykes

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brittanybwrites · 2 years

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My new current reads:

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (almost done with it, tbh)

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten

Pathfinder Tales: Shy Knives by Sam Sykes

#booklr #bibliophile #the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and mr. hyde #robert louis stevenson #howl’s moving castle #diana wynne jones #for the wolf #hannah whitten #pathfinder #shy knives #Sam sykes #currently reading

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nightblood · 3 months

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I read Seven Blades in Black and enjoyed it.

The title is kind of boring though. I think if the cover hadn't caught my eye I wouldn't have picked it up. I also don't think it's super fitting. Like yeah the owners of those seven blades are the target of Sal's revenge, but they blades are especially prominent. Only two of the conspirators actually use them.

#seven blades in black #the grave of empires #sam sykes

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shobolanya · 4 months

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first drawing this year, sam and oli

#sam carter #oli sykes #oliver sykes #architects band #bring me the horizon #my art #i really love the reference picture it's so adorable and cute and soft

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tommytokugamer · 2 months

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Avalanche - Bring Me The Horizon feat. Moon Goats(AI Cover)

Well, I tried to do a cover of Avalanche but only I get a collaboration between these two. Well, I hope the moon goats be ready for the breakdowns.

#the loud house #nickelodeon #loud house #ai cover #bmth bring me the horizon #bmth #luna loud #sam sharp #mazzy #sully #Oliver Sykes #moon goats #bring me the horizon

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gunkreads · 1 year

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I think I’m actually going to be quite brief (future gunk here: “so that was a fucking lie”) about Seven Blades in Black by Sam Sykes, given how much I enjoyed it. Putting my critique goggles on is revealing it to be more derivative and flawed than I felt while reading.

This book is one of those “bear with me” kinds of stories. It presents a very over-the-top, indulgent, hamfisted approach to what is, in my opinion, fundamentally a very simple story. It’s an American Western revenge story with a pretty solid magical world laid over it. If you’ve ever seen The Outlaw Josey Wales--it’s genuinely kinda like that. However, as I’ll explain in about three paragraphs, this isn’t exclusively criticism.

The author has a bit of fun with the whole format of “protagonist telling a character a story in-universe” and plays very simply with unreliable narration (”simply” meaning it’s easy to tell when something’s narrated unreliably and the factual truth is pretty apparent). I feel kind of mean making this comparison, but it’s an all-around clumsier and less-artful version of Patrick Rothfuss’ style. That’s not necessarily to say it’s clumsy--though you may find it to be--but the book is... not the most elegant thing I’ve ever read.

Its setting is very fun--basically, the protagonist Sal is fucking around in the “no-man’s-land” area of this big war going on between a corrupted and rotting Empire and a fascist Revolution. Not exactly the newest thing on the block, and the reasons for the war aren’t necessarily that original either. There are some extra layers to it, but those would have to come up in later books, if at all.

Sal as a character is very fun to read, and there’s a particular phenomenon in the book’s prose that makes her that way. See, there’s this piece of writing advice that sticks in my brain like a shard of glass that goes something like “not every line has to be a masterpiece, or an emotional revelation, or a dust jacket quotable.” Personally, I don’t like this mindset, because I believe that striving for an impossible standard is the only way to find out how far Zeno’s Paradox goes when chasing perfection. Sykes doesn’t seem to like it either; his book is written like every single paragraph is supposed to make you have a physical reaction. It doesn’t land every time--in fact, early in the book, it’s so annoying that I almost put it down--but eventually you come to a realization: it’s fun to watch someone try to reach for the impossible.

Sykes really, really wants everything Sal says and thinks to be a tooth-cracking showstopper. In chasing this ideal, he necessarily misses most of the time. However, he chases the idea with a kind of earnestness that I rarely see in fantasy. I actually think that Sykes does “gruff antihero” the same way Sara Douglass does “highfalutin paragon of justice” or Tolkien does “unbreakable brotherly bonds”: with an absolute commitment to and love for the concept that allows you (or at least me) to forgive any misses (this is not commentary on whether Douglass or Tolkien miss on these).

I found myself cringing at this book pretty frequently up to about the end of the first act. It took a while to get a handle on how far Sykes was going to take this writing style. After that point, though, it grew on me enough that I realized he did the same thing that Pierce Brown does that I love so much: they create a world where People Just Talk Like That.

See, there’s this magical thing in fiction called “internal consistency”. If something does not align with reality, but aligns with a work of fiction the same way every time, it becomes real within that fiction. This is why “acting out of character” and “plot holes” are such an issue: they dive in the way of our suspension of disbelief. Internal consistency creates and aids suspension of disbelief. Have you ever heard a white guy from Seatlle say “y’all”? It’s the fictional equivalent of that. He doesn’t fucking talk that way. Why’s he doing it now? Sykes has People Just Talk Like That 24/7/365 and it lets you suspend your disbelief in a way that you couldn’t if he just doled out the hard-hitting lines once in a while. Keeps congruity in the prose.

Once again, this isn’t to say Sykes is consistently good at it. He goes overboard a lot, asking me to find gravity in things that are decidedly low-gravity or asking me to laugh or cry over things that I didn’t already want to. However, the through-line of over-the-top narration works.

Wanna know why it works? Because Sal, who’s constantly shown to be a dickhead with her entire skull shoved up her own ass (love those kinds of characters btw), is narrating. Of course this egotistical asshat wants you to think everything she does is the coolest thing ever. She’s even telling the story to someone who’s going to execute her--there’s no reason to put the brakes on. Of course, this is all a choice made by Sykes, so everything leads back to that, but it’s there in-universe.

The action in this book is fun. It’s not amazing in a kinetic way, but it has pretty stellar setpieces and never feels pointless. Sal navigates violence and chaos in a very entertainingly Nathan Drake kind of way--taking her licks in a mad dash to either safety or whatever she came here to do. The action tends to be of a very physical variety, with plenty of gory details and a solid dash of body horror mixed in.

However, here’s a pretty chunky issue with Sal’s character: her motivations do not feel consistent. I get that this is meant to reflect her complicated feelings about her current life path, but there were a lot of points where I didn’t understand why she took the hard path when the easy one seemed so obvious (and often had been pointed out by her). It felt like sometimes she took the hard path for one reason, but later she took the easy path for that exact same reason. The context had changed, sure, but it didn’t change that much. Just something to watch out for.

BUT ALL THAT SAID.

I had a really good time reading this book. If you like anything gritty and grimy and bombastic and dark and fun, I think you’ll enjoy Seven Blades in Black. It’s brain candy, for sure, and it’s a little more on top of that. It’s got all the same things right with it as Kings of the Wyld, just with a few more things wrong. A very fun choice and a good book to slap up on your in-progress pile while taking breaks from more serious reads.

#seven blades in black #sam sykes #grave of empires

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