Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Roanne Lau! Her epic fantasy debut novel, The Serpent Called Mercy, was just released in the US and the UK toward the end of March. Described as a book “where a debt-ridden slumdog joins an illegal monster-fighting arena for some fast coin, but quickly learns the most dangerous beasts are outside the ring,” her novel is also one that centers friendship. I’m thrilled she’s here today to share more about this aspect of her new book and why she thinks this platonic relationship resonates at this particular time in her essay “Crayon Trails: On Friendship, Grief, and an Unlikely Book Deal.”

About The Serpent Called Mercy:

The Witcher meets Squid Game in this Malaysian Chinese-inspired epic fantasy novel where a debt-ridden slumdog joins an illegal monster-fighting arena for some fast coin, but quickly learns the most dangerous beasts are outside the ring

Lythlet and her only friend Desil are shackled to a life of debt and poverty that she fears they will never escape. Desperate for money, they sign up as conquessors: arena combatants who fight sun-cursed beasts in the seedy underworld of the city.

Match-master Dothilos is initially enamored of Desil’s brawling reputation, but after seeing Lythlet lead the pair to triumph with her quick cunning, he takes her under his wing, scorning Desil. Ambition takes root in Lythlet’s heart as a life of fame and wealth unfolds in her imagination.

But Lythlet isn’t the only one out for coin and glory, and she soon finds herself playing an entirely different game—a game of politics and deception. As the cost of her ambition grows, she will have to decide if sacrificing her honor, and only friendship, is worth the chance to shape her own fortune.

A whirlwind of blood-pounding battles as characters grapple with their choices in the face of wealth and financial security, The Serpent Called Mercy‘s heart is the underlying, steadfast friendship between its protagonists.

Crayon Trails: On Friendship, Grief, and an Unlikely Book Deal

I have no idea how I got my book deal.

This isn’t an attempt at faux modesty where I go “aww shucks, how did little ol’ me get a book deal?”

I’m genuinely baffled at how, in the context of capitalism, I got my book deal now, of all times.

If you’re paying attention to publishing industry trends, you’ll know that romantasy is the subgenre du jour. Readers can’t get enough of it, and publishers are snapping up all the beautifully written romantasies they can, debuting some wonderfully talented writers ready to give readers what they want. Now is the era of hyphenated phrases like slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers, and oh-my-god-there-was-only-one-bed.

Whenever these hyphen-heavy discussions happen, I find myself twiddling my thumbs awkwardly as I contemplate how my book The Serpent Called Mercy has literally none of these things. Hell, the only kiss my protagonist Lythlet gives is to a dog she adopts during the course of the story. She does get some consoling forehead smooches from her dearest friend Desil, though.

Romantic it might not be, but that friendship between Lythlet and Desil is the core relationship of The Serpent Called Mercy.

I started working on this book nearly a decade ago (I swear I’ll try not to take as long on my next book), and though it has changed dramatically over the years, one of the very few things that remained the same is this friendship. I wanted to craft a deeply intimate yet complicated connection between two individuals, a connection defined by loyalty, struggle, and choice.

I was happy to broaden the scope of the story to include familial bonds as well, another type of platonic connection that I love exploring—the notion of filial piety being something intrinsically rooted in my Chinese heritage. Yet romance was something I quite readily discarded for this book early on, with no desire to push Lythlet and Desil’s bond down that path.

Platonic bonds are the ones that build the foundation of who we are, after all. We enter this world, and our first connections are with our families. Then we get shipped out to daycare or preschool, and there, in our little bodies seated upon rainbow plastic chairs, we meet our next type of connection: a friend.

You’d glance at the kid next to you, and because society hasn’t had enough time to stamp any sense of shame or anxiety in you, you’d bark out your name, ask for theirs, and boom, new friend acquired. And if you discovered even one point of commonality (we both like crayons?!), then that was your best friend, the two of you leaving crayon doodles all over the place.

Those crayon trails could extend further into life, if you were careful about maintaining your bonds—and if fate let them continue. One of my closest friends now is someone I’ve known since I was eight, our friendship first taking root in Malaysia, before drifting apart for years as we shifted to different schools, only for us to miraculously bump into each other again over ten years later in Australia of all places, friendship rekindling and remaining strong to this day.

Yet fate hasn’t been as kind towards other crayon trails. Another childhood friend of mine, despite steadfast efforts to keep our friendship intact even when we lived in different countries, passed away in 2020 from a heart attack. A senseless, illogical death for a healthy young man. This was right before COVID hit us all, and the world shut down—so I wasn’t the only one with a grieving heart in those days.

Throughout the pandemic, I watched fate draw harsh ends to various crayon trails. (Oddly enough, never to COVID itself.) I lost my childhood friend to a heart attack. My beloved aunt, a cheerful travel companion and firm believer in Colin Firth’s supremacy as Mr. Darcy, to cancer. My grandmother, at long last, to a weary decade-long battle with Alzheimer’s.

I was working on one of my final revisions of The Serpent Called Mercy throughout this time, the pandemic and all these deaths looming in the backdrop of my thoughts. Looking back on it, I think it’s fairly evident that grief was weighing upon me as I replotted my book and tightened up my character arcs, striking as deep as I could into their psyches and focusing as much as I could on their interpersonal dynamics.

If my life were a stretched-out canvas, once an unblemished white when I was born, I can now see all the indelible marks others have made upon it, every individual grasping a crayon in their hand and leaving behind a waxy trail in their favourite colours, all the way through until they left my life—destiny taking us down different directions, or death coming to whisk them away to other worlds.

These crayon trails—some so painfully short, others blissfully long—reflect not just the fleeting nature of all these connections, but their capacity for transformation, the way they’ve re-rendered what was the once-blank canvas of my life into something more colourful.

Some deaths, I have come to peace with. Others remain difficult to contemplate beyond journal entries and private visits to crematoriums.

So, I return to my original quandary: how on earth did I, with my thoroughly unromantic book, get my book deal now of all times? Publishing is neither a charity nor a meritocracy—right now, romantasy is pulling in the big bucks, and the industry’s capitalising on it while it lasts.

With both hindsight and COVID bringing to mind the number 2020, the answer’s obvious to me now. I got my agent in 2022, as the world slowly crawled out of lockdown, and my book deal came a little later. After enduring a horrific, once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, we had all been forced to consider not just our mortality, but that of our loved ones. Agents, editors, readers—everyone who makes up the publishing industry, we all had the miserable experience of bonds being cut short by fate, colours choked out by a greying grief that remains to this day.

So maybe the reason why I got my book deal when I did was because somewhere in the cogs of the publishing industry, there was a recognition that we should celebrate every single bond while we still have it. Maybe the fact of the matter is that as beautiful as romantic love stories can be, there’s also a timeless quality to platonic love—to the family and friends who have made us who we are, who have added colour to our lives.

The Serpent Called Mercy celebrates all this. Lythlet and Desil’s earnest childhood friendship reflects the spirit of transformative love and loyalty that I’ve been lucky enough to experience in my life in various ways. Their individual struggles and desires, their shared hardships and victories, their choices to grow and change—they offer just a glimpse of the crayon trails etched into my personal canvas, drawn by every hand that’s ever touched my soul.

Photography by Caleb Lim Foong Kin

Roanne Lau is the speculative fiction author of The Serpent Called Mercy. Her works are informed by her Chinese heritage and her experiences living in Malaysia, Australia, Taiwan, and Japan. She was selected for the Pitch Wars mentorship program in 2021—but the accomplishment she remains proudest of is being a finalist in a Lord of the Rings trivia competition when she was nine. Find her on social media (@roannelau) and subscribe to her newsletter at www.roannelau.com.