Warning: Contains spoilers. You might want to read the story first!
I used to be very nervous about doing these publication notes but I also felt a necessity to do them because otherwise, with every publication there would be wild speculations about the provenance of the plot. I still laugh sometimes about a reader who thought my penanggalan horror story was “a real story”. Well, none of my stories are literally “my life” but there will always be a lot of past trauma limning some of the words. Not all of the words! Ditto “Vengeance As Sweet As My Love“, which the lovely editors of Translunar Travelers Lounge decided to accept and publish on August 15 2025.
The idea for this story came while I was swimming on the evening of Halloween, in 2016. I was still young and more mobile (although 41 year old me would not believe that). My evening swims happened 3-4 nights a week back then. I went to the gym after work, and did my cardio and strength training first before hitting the pool. I preface with this anecdote because I need to talk to you about that swimming pool. lt was spooky AF after dark so I shudder in horror these days in recollection of my evening swims. Back then, it was nice to swim between 7-8pm (when the pool closed) because most of the yelling children and families who clogged the lanes would be gone. I could just do my butterfly strokes up and down the near Olympic-sized pool to reach my daily allotment of 20 laps uninterrupted (I counted 1 lap as up and down). But there was always a mysterious current in the pool. If you swam too close to the middle you’d find yourself pushed to the side. Eventually, I started nurturing superstitions about that swimming pool albeit still fearless enough to keep swimming. I kept wondering if that pool was inhabited, if you know what I mean.
That evening of 31 October 2016 I had in my head the story of a different sort of watermaiden; one who was part puaka air, part human. Her words in my head were angry but precise. I was thinking of a three-way kind of enmity between two monstrous women and a man who was an in-between. Dangerous Liaisons meets Sherlock Holmes meets Dvorak’s Rusalka meets Malaysian folk horror. That was the basic premise which I played around with. I was so excited by the idea that after I got home I wrote almost the entirety of that draft in one sitting. That version of the story was shorter. I enlarged the scope after not one, but two revision requests. I added information about Maren’s family. I included a bit of hand-me-down family lore (the mining pool). Neither editor liked what I did with it so I just kept submitting it.
I think this should explain enough how mostly distanced I was in one sense from the protagonist and the narrative. In another way, there’s always going to be a small bit of me in these tales. The part of it that is me is simply the rage that all women like me carry around for most of our days. Pudgy, considered unattractive, overlooked, and always treated like a beast of burden or someone who has to perform emotional and intellectual labour which others harvest for profit or glory. Always a punchline, never taken seriously. Not so much these days for me because I put down boundaries and I think a lot of people would think twice before treating me the way I used to be treated when I was younger. Also, that’s the benefit of being old and cranky and having a very healthy sense of boundaries and personal space.
Have I been mocked or hurt in precisely the same way as Maren? Yeah, nope, fortunately not! I felt bad for her when I wrote the scene (literally just spooled out in my head when I was storyboarding this) but I have been hurt and mocked in other less dramatic ways. This is why fiction is fiction, after all. We create scenarios, and what-ifs! In this “What-if”, I really wanted to explore that whole Sherlock-Moriarty dynamic which was almost a Love-Death thing. I wrote an entire MA dissertation on the Ritual Love-Death in Angela Carter’s works so you can see how that was a fixation. And I’ve been a Sherlock Holmes fangirl since I was a kid. The obsessive connection between Sherlock and Moriarty has been teased out in two 21st century television adaptations so I was musing on that quite a bit as I worked on this story but at some point I went, “Why does it always have to be romance? What about toxic friendships or toxic could-have-been friendships?”
For me, character dynamics tend to propel plot and this is one of those cases. I’ll probably write a post about character dynamics at some point but for now, I hope you enjoy this story which I started submitting in 2016 and nearly trunked more than once because I was worried that it was too angry and too violent. I can’t write like this anymore in my mellow and exhausted 50s, but I still think Maren and all the Marens out there deserve to be heard.
Is Maren connected to the other two Puaka Air stories I have published (including the novel, Watermyth)? No, not in a more immediate sense. Maria (of When Hope is Lost, Touch Remains) and Aila are cousins. Maren (as far as I know, haha) is not a relative. But these water-demons are connected in another way: a shared world. This is a Bunian Empire story, a harbinger of the post-apocalyptic Bunian Empire suite which is connected to the far-future suite (Your Right Arm, Prosthetic Daughter etc). Because “Sherlock Holmes, but make it Malaysian Folk Horror” eventually became “but also make it super-weirdo Malaysian cyberpunk”. I’m just so glad this super-weirdo folk horror cyberpunk yarn of mine found a home. I hope readers like it. And I wish for all other Marens out there a happier fate and a way to find autonomy and to set your own boundaries in all matters. Because boundaries are love and self-care.
Published in Petaling, Selangor. August 2025.
Curious to read my debut novel Watermyth? Here’s the information on how to purchase the ebook (and how to borrow it from the library) and the print edition.