#but the rest of it (ie first paragraph) the use of you is intentional

[writingreadinglurkingandsmirking]

I wrote this one in first person because writing in second person irritates my very soul.

idk if you noticed but it was written in First and second person lolll 😭

Okay so fun fact, writing this I was flipping between first and second every so often because I work on multiple projects at a time. So like no hate or shade to you, genuinely (I love people telling me this shit because I ✨hate✨ editing)!

But I just went through it and read again, and there were two places where I had "you" that should've been "I" from my scan. The rest of it where there is you is written the way it's meant to be, like anywhere else it's "you" and you're thinking "I" is probably a style/voice issue?

I'm tew tired for this it's been a long weekend

[a-duck-with-a-book]

REVIEW // Seven Blades in Black (The Grave of Empires #1) by Sam Sykes

★☆☆☆☆

Disclaimer: while I was reading this book, I found out that Sam Sykes has been accused by numerous women of sexual harassment. You can find more information about it below: - a post listing several accusations of misconduct - twitter post responding to the situation - one of the accusations against Sam Sykes - his quickly-deleted apology Suffice to say, I have no intention of continuing this series or reading any more of his books.

I have a lot to say about this novel, so I’ll begin by making a quick bullet point list outlining what I liked and disliked:

Liked:

Cavric <3

Lisette deserved better

Some interesting concepts in the world building

Disliked:

Sal as a narrator

Sal as an antihero

Sal as a person in general

Writing style

Constant interruptions

Meandering narrative

The “narrator knows something but the writer avoids revealing it until the end for the drama” trope

This is a Big Tough World and Nobody Gets To Be Happy

Lesbians written by a man who harasses women

Unnecessarily long

// image: official cover art Jeremy Wilson //

Let’s begin with the full review by starting with the (few) positives, shall we?

First and foremost, I genuinely enjoyed Cavric and Lisette. It is unfortunate that they had to deal with Sal for the entirety of the novel, but we’ll get to her later. If this book had been a buddy adventure with these two, in which Cavric slowly shows Lisette that she is in a toxic relationships and deserves to move on and find someone better for herself, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. Secondly (and finally), Sykes introduced some genuinely interesting world building. The background of the Empire and the Scar was fascinating to read, but unfortunately did not save the rest of this mess.

Alright now let’s rant.

I have 35 notes and 52 highlights from this book, so this might get block quote heavy. (Go check out my notes if you want to see me slowly lose my sanity)

Sal is awful. I know she’s meant to be awful, but she’s not flawed in the way that I think Sykes was trying to write her. I believe she was intended to be a scruffy, lovable antihero who fought her way through a dangerous landscape with her sharp blade and even sharper tongue. A girl who had wrongs committed against her in the past, who did terrible things but is now on the road to an epic redemption arc. She shoots bad guys, she says f*ck and a*s a lot, and she is morally complex. That’s the character that Sykes was trying to make. The one he created, however, is a genuinely terrible person who I had no desire to see come out on top. I have a myriad of issues with her, but let’s outline a couple below: (1) She is incredibly toxic for Lisette. Am I getting a bit too heated about a fictional relationship? Sure. Was I happy to read a toxic lesbian romance written by a man who sexually harasses women? Nope. It kind of grossed me out, actually. Anyway, let me give you a run down of their relationship. Sal arrives. Sal and Lisette sleep together. Sal asks Lisette to give her weapons and or fix things for her. Sal sneaks away, telling herself no good will come of this relationship and they will only cause each other pain. Sal needs something. Sal comes back. Repeat over and over. She constantly says, throughout the book, that it would be better if they just left each other, but then again Sal is the one who goes back to Lisette over and over, causing her renewed heartbreak. I don’t know if Sykes thought that simply making Sal aware of how terrible this behavior was was enough, but it just made me incredibly frustrated. At one point Sal says:

”Intellect like hers is a curse. The more you understand of the world, the less of it you trust.”

Yes, Sal, that’s what’s giving her trust issues. Her intelligence. Nice. By the end of the book, it seems that they are on the mend-I’m getting end-game vibes from these two. But honestly, I spent the entire time thinking that Lisette deserved so much better than Sal. Like literally a chicken would have provided healthier companionship. I’ll end with this quote, in which Lisette outlines perfectly why Sal does not deserve her:

“What am I doing wrong that you’d choose this over me?”

(2) Sal is annoying. Really, really annoying. I kid you not, half of this book is made up of Sal’s snarky comments. She is badass. She has a gun. She is an outlaw. And she will never, EVER shut up about it. Imagine a quirky line after an otherwise dark or action-packed sequence. Funny, right? Might break the tension, make the narrator more endearing, etc. Now imagine one such line after every. Single. Paragraph. Picture a violent battle scene where the protagonist is fighting for their lives against a ruthless opponent. Now insert a snarky comment after every other paragraph and watch the entire flow of the scene fall apart with constant interruptions. That’s what this book is-which brings me to my next point.

The writing isn’t great. There are constant interruptions, meandering narratives, and the trope that haunts me in nearly every dark fantasy novel I read-This is a Big Tough World and Nobody Gets To Be Happy-is shoved repeatedly in your face. Let’s start with the interruptions, returning to my previous point (ie. Sal never shuts up), by looking at this sequence:

I  followed the shrieking wind. I had come here prepared for something bad. But I wasn’t prepared for just how bad it was. I rounded the corner of the hall, came out atop a battlement. The wind struck me with a screaming gale, forcing me to shield my face and cling to the stone for purchase. My eyes squinted against the harshness of the light, the kind of offensive pale you only see in your nightmares. And through them, I could see the bowed shapes of towers sagging, the flayed flesh of banners whipping in a wind that wouldn’t cease, the shadows of figures frozen in a death that had brought no peace. And I knew where I was. There was nothing that had ever made Fort Dogsjaw special. It had never been crucial for defense, never a hub for trade, it hadn’t even been named for anything special—the commander just liked the sound of it. It lived its whole life a regular, boring Imperial fort on the edge of the Husks. It only got important at the time of its death. Over three hundred mages and a few thousand regulars had assembled here in one day—some to receive assignments, some to man the garrison, some to head back to Cathama on leave. They had been laughing, cursing, drinking when the news came that the new Emperor of Cathama was a nul, born with no magic. And then there had been a moment of silence.

I’ve bolded for emphasis, but do you see what I’m talking about? The paragraph-line-paragraph-line format is so annoying to read, I had to put the book down at certain points because of how frustrated I got. It interrupted the forward movement of the story, making the novel drag on and on.

You know what else makes this feel like the nightmare version of the Never-ending Story? The page count. I don’t mind long books-The Priory of the Orange Tree is one of my favorite reads so far this year, and it’s longer than this one-but they have to have a reason for being so hefty. As I mentioned earlier, a considerable chunk of Seven Blades of Black is Sal making her awful, awful, AWFUL asides. I literally cannot express how much I despise those comments. Okay, let’s move on before I get hung up on THOSE STUPID COM-*cough*

This novel is marred by unnecessary lines and a meandering plot that drag out the story. One instance is the amount of times that Sal is a second away from killing someone and, for some reason (usually not a good one), fails in her goal. She places a gun at someone’s head and goes through a whole monologue in her head until the person miraculously escapes. This type of subversion of expectations is fine every once in a while, but if you are going to build up to a crucial moment and then take away the satisfaction of the defeat of some villain (or mini-boss, as many of the antagonists in this book feel like), then you need to have a good reason for doing it upwards of twenty times in ONE BOOK. Secondly, if you spend almost the entire novel setting up more and more villains and stressing how hard they are to kill and how dangerous their powers are (and presenting them separately and isolated), then when you have them all in one place at the end, at which point the protagonists starts going through them like a plate of french fries at a seagull convention, then you’re kind of taking away the satisfaction of the death. Somehow, this book manages to do both. We are constantly teased with almost-kills, then at the end Sal just blows through everyone in five seconds, easy-peasy.

I’m almost done, I swear-just two more gripes.

So much of the tension of this book rests on the fact that Sal, our narrator and our main viewpoint into the story, knows something that we don’t. I’ll be upfront with you-I hate this trope. If our POV character, the one whose mind we are in constantly, is entirely aware of something that happened before the beginning of the novel, and the author keeps from revealing that something for the entirety of the story solely to add drama, then I will not be a happy reader. Where is the logic. We are in this person’s mind. Just show us already and add tension ELSEWHERE.

And FINALLY (as painful as it was for you to read this, it was worse for me to write it), another issue I have with a lot of dark fantasy (see my review of Nevernight) is that the author really, really wants us to know that this is an incredibly dangerous and dark world by filling it to the brim with edge lord narrators, Big Guns, and, usually, women being harrased-because why not force all your female readers to constantly have to read about women getting assaulted? Apart from Sal’s 300,000 comments explaining to us that she is an asshole, that the Scar is Dangerous, and that she has Killed A Lot of People, we as readers must sit through hundreds of lines of dialogue and exposition that beat us over the head with the fact that this is DARK fantasy. This isn’t your nice little fairy adventure-no sir. Here we have Swear Words and Violence and Men writing Queer Women. To emphasize just how blatant Sykes is with the dark part of dark fantasy, let me tell you about an exchange Sal has with three old ladies who run a criminal empire. In the 2-3 pages that these women appear in, we are told, in some form or other, that they are grandmas who kill people, a grand total of, I kid you not, ELEVEN TIMES. Here are some excerpts from that whole situation:

”“Now, now.” Yoc, old and white haired and sweet as a grandmother—if that grandmother also had people killed on the regular—smiled at me. “I’m sure she has a good reason for being here.” She raised the hand that had signed the contracts that had killed a thousand men and women and took up her whiskey glass. “After all, I’m sure she knows how much we don’t like having our game interrupted.”” *I counted this as one since it’s in the same exchange but technically he mentions it TWICE

”…one didn’t waste the Three’s time if one didn’t want to end up with their teeth pried out.”

”How often do you meet the three old ladies who have people killed for money?”

”I said we should kill her on principle.”

”“But you know how many orphans I’ve made, don’t you, dear?””

”“He’s not so unlike us, is he? A murderer, yes. A monster to some. But, at his heart, a businessman.”

”Theirs were the hands that signed a thousand death contracts a year.”

”When they could be bothered to look up from their game, they decided who lived and died with a stroke of their pen.”

”At a word, they could have me stripped, tied, tortured, and cut up…”

”the Three don’t lie. Their assassins do. Their thieves do. But they don’t.”

”I had already wasted their time and I knew the Three were being generous just letting me fuck off instead of having me killed for the effort.”

TL;DR - Sal is annoying, Sykes is a bad writer, and Someone should have stopped me from reading this book

[daynajackson-blog1]

User testing

Instead of making a working prototype for my wireframes, I instead got people to scroll through them on my phone and first tell me what they thought each page was asking them to do and then how they thought this meaning could be made more clear. In instances where they read a page differently to my intention, I explained my intention to them after they’d finished talking about their thoughts, then we talked and worked on which meaning was better and how it could be made clearer. Observations as follows:

For setup screens:

The explanations of what the names are used for is too vague - say what you mean no matter how simply you have to put it and how long it takes to explain.

If the app is called Alfie, it will need rewording because “this is how your kids will see you within Alfie” sounds weird.

On the “add family” page, how do you minus a person if you accidentally added too many? Some people suggested that it’s a tap to select the person, and then a tap on a delete button, whereas others suggested that they would want to drag the icon and have a little bin icon show up that they can drag it to. Both possible ways may need testing to resolve this.

When inputting age, would it bring up a keyboard to type in the numbers or would you scroll through a finite list of selections? Again, testing needed to clarify which is better.

Everyone understood and explained the difference between parental control by people or by room, which I didn’t expect! 

For parental control by people:

Clearly can see that different people are accessed through top toolbar

Would expect that if someone could use something in a room then the room icon colour would also be the “selected” colour, same as the “selected” colour in the tab bar above, so that can easily see at a glance what rooms have appliances in them that can be controlled by this person. 

Would expect room icons to be a different colour (grey) if that person can’t use anything within the room.

Here, I asked if there needed to be a distinction between seeing if the person could control everything in a room versus just some things. Everyone said that it wouldn’t particularly matter to them that much as the biggest distinction is between can/can’t use.

Then when you go into the appliances of a room, would expect there to be coloured ones as a secondary way of showing that they can be used by this person (with the primary way being that they appear in the “can use” list).

Appliances/icons all need labels because when icons are small it’s very easy to get them mixed up or to forget what they are.

There should be an instruction about how the page works ie “drag the icons into lists to change whether a person can or can’t use an appliance”

Several people thought that all of the appliances should appear out of lists when the user is setting up parental controls, for the user to then categorise into the lists. I explained that inputting the age of each user would broadly classify the appliances into the lists already (eg anyone under 10 can’t use the oven, microwave, cooktop), and asked if they thought that this would be a feature of value within the app or whether it would make it too confusing. All thought that it made sense to do it the way I had intended, that it would save time and make set up easier.

For parental control by room:

In my observation, most people seemed to find understanding control via room more difficult - hopefully rewording the explanation paragraph under kitchen will make this easier. Might need to also consider having onboarding tips for first time users.

A few people thought that if someone is set to “can’t use” for the room overall, then their icon shouldn’t show up for individual appliances. However, once I explained that this was to allow overrides in the case of certain appliances without having to update the control rules for the rest of the room, they thought this was the best way to go. 

This conversation did however bring up the need for a “return to defaults” button for each appliance once the control settings have been modified, to remove the override if needed.

If a person is set to “can’t use” for a room, there should also be a warning when they are being moved away from this position in an override to make sure that the user is aware of what they are doing. 

From an aesthetic/usability point of view, everyone said they would expect that the appliances would be closed up into a list, where they could expand and close the settings for each appliance as needed.

Other questions that I asked to do with usability:

Q: Is the paragraph under kitchen too small to read? A: No, it's fine. Some people tried it without their glasses and said it was still fine. I tested this on a range of age groups, so this was good feedback to receive.

Q: Is it too confusing for the top toolbar to have icons and labels? Would you prefer just text, or just an icon? A: The icon and label combo was the most preferred by far.

Q: What do you think of the size of the labels on the room menu page when setting controls relative to people? A: They look too big and could definitely be smaller while still easily readable.

A lot of updates to be made, but I think they will all definitely improve my design as I move forward!