Offshore

Postscript

A big dump of my author notes for the end of the story, which includes all thoughts and details that I had to keep out of my author notes, character profiles, etc. because of spoilers. If you don't like being spoiled, please turn back, because this page spoils the entire story.

OK, first of all, seriously thank you for reading the novel that's been rotating in my brain for the past 7 months. The last time I released a complete novel was 2013, and I forgot how it felt to have people along riding the ups and downs of the story as I released each chapter. I wasn’t expecting anyone to be following along. I'm delighted to be wrong. I had a lot of fun; I hope you did too! And, please, if there's anything you'd like to say or ask, I am always more than happy to reply.

This postscript will hopefully not tread the same ground as what's on the other masterpost tabs. This is about the details I had to keep out of my author notes, profiles and public masterpost because of spoilers.

I wrote the entirety of Offshore in November 2022, and it almost didn't happen.

I was meant to have a conference trip spanning half the month! I wouldn't have the time for NaNoWriMo.

As the record shows, I did manage to write the novel during the trip. Bits of the conference snuck into the story. Afterparties. Press. Ephemeral acquaintances giving me tips on how not to be nervous in front of the camera. Flying. Helsinki cafes. At one point I was passing the document between three different devices to maximise my opportunities to write.

I believe that in the final version of Offshore, only one scene was added that wasn't in the original draft. Everything else you've read? Is pretty similar to what I churned out during that run. I'm kinda proud of that.

It was only after I finished the first draft (and got home) that the art floodgates really opened. By then, I hadn't drawn regularly in almost half a year, and it was just perfectly serendipitous timing for a creative outlet to fall into my lap. So...I started animating them. Then I made an album for them. I started making a jokey VN. I animated them again. And again. I've drawn 140 art pieces for this project so far, and commissioned + received more (THANK YOU to everyone who's drawn my characters, I love you and your art forever).

There's probably more things I'm forgetting, but the point is that I have never been this excited for an OC story in my life. I don't know what's happening and I am kind of just gonna ride it out to the end.

I feel like it was always self-evident, from the entire setup of the story, that the Cloudlanders would win.

I guess if I did it right, the buildup to the finals might've been a plausible setup for the team learning to be OK with second place. And that's part of it! They did their best and at the end of it, it's the journey that I hope felt like an achievement, not the actual winning, which could happen to any team in any year really. They won the second leg by a much bigger margin than they lost the first (and they usually do), so the format is fundamentally not a raw test of skill. They were just failing to perform under pressure in the third leg.

But! If somehow I managed to sustain the tension right to the end, then I'll be pleased! I feel like there's only so much 4D chess you want to play with your readers ("did I set this up well enough to throw the readers off the scent that they were meant to win all along?"), and it's much nicer to just revel in the journey. Them winning was just the most emotionally resonant thing to happen there, I felt. Because the real win isn't that they got a trophy, it's that they kept trying and pushed through after being knocked down multiple times.

And also that they got together. That's the reason I wrote the story lol. It's also part of the whole "kept trying after being knocked down" thing...

I’ve always enjoyed naming chapters to a pattern. For this one, I tried to stick to a format of: 2 words, 1-2 syllables each, each title containing at least one noun (no matter how I strove, two nouns was too restrictive and I couldn’t stick to it every chapter, though I tried).

A lot of these titles are symbolic/double entendres, but I'll let you find those yourself, haha.

"It's all about the recovery!" - I rarely foreshadow intentionally or clock it as such. But if anything in the story was intentional foreshadowing, it's this line from Chapter 1.

I have said many times that this story is a bit of a vent. Jinai's story is especially so. I call them both deuteragonists, but I'd be lying if I said Jinai wasn't the one driving the story for me ðŸ˜… I often say it's a story about recovery, and I think the theme of recovery centres mostly on her.

Oftentimes, I worried about how to convey the conflict in Jinai’s life in a way that made her attitude towards life seem plausible, and sympathetic even. She has long felt incapable of meeting the demands of others, as well as her own. In her view, she tore her team apart, couldn’t meet her potential as a sailor, and couldn’t keep the man she thought she’d live the rest of her life with—even though none of those things were really her fault. She perennially sees how she could have done things different, not how others wronged her. When she began to contemplate the possibility of romance with her teammate, she instantly expected she would also mess this up like everything else.

By all standards, nothing egregiously bad happened! No one died, no one was intentionally harmed, no one is threatening Jinai to win this race or else. The conflict is almost fully internal and self-originating. So if I was able to convey her struggles in a convincing, affecting way, then my work here is done. Asking Anqien to be her partner was actually very scary for her because she didn’t want to ruin everything for them.

It was so cathartic putting her entire life and struggle on the table, and then helping her find a way through it. Even though she's tired and sad, she still loves being at sea, and charting journeys into the unknown. That's something no amount of loss could take away from her. Her relationship with her teammate is one such journey and her recovery is mapped in her shifting attitude towards the feelings she's long denied. As she learns to get over her fear of falling short, she also comes to be willing to take that plunge, to "risk being burned again"...

Anqien always means well and will accept and tolerate most things to their absolute breaking point. On the other hand, they don't feel like they're allowed to make big decisions without someone else signing off. Their personal struggles are hidden from plain sight, by their own choice, and for a reason.

Anqien never left their family home. I imagine their family is like mine in that (they even have the same surname as mine): they were discouraged from moving out. But it's about more than just the family home, obviously: the family also intended for them to inherit the family business. They've always been at odds with this stifling life their parents were orchestrating for them.

My aim was to demonstrate the role that sailing and the race have played in their self-discovery and the growth away from that preplanned future. To them, the sport is their singular out from a life they don’t want to live. It was the first thing to ever make them feel like there was a different future for them, one that they were hitherto never allowed to even contemplate. It is also the only space where they're afforded the chance to literally chart their course and call the shots, which...they're really not used to.

Having the less experienced sailor be the skipper, I felt, introduced some interest to the team dynamic—what with Anqien being distinctly less confident and Jinai often having to correct them, or prompt them to call manoeuvres. Towards the end, they start to flip the dynamic more often: Anqien gets bolder and corrects Jinai increasingly often, both during the sailing and outside it. And then, of course, they have to call her out and tell her where she went wrong. Would Anqien at the start of the story have been able to do that? Probably not...

So I hope people heeded the "warning" of slow burn fluff because holy shit this is a fluffy wholesome relationship if I've ever written one. But I hope that it still felt like it had...some tension?

I'm fond of when positive progression of the romance requires the characters to grow as people. Obviously, at the start of the story, neither of them was even remotely ready for romance. As they figured themselves out, they also became increasingly ready to be proper, healthy partners in an equal relationship.

Bottom line is: I love them both very much. They have both suffered (in their own ordinary low-magic way) and they are each other's respite that they absolutely earned.

It brings me a lot of joy to know that people enjoy other members of the cast, even though they aren't in the spotlight all that much. Some of my standout thoughts about the other characters:

XYE. Oh, Xye. I like to describe writing Xye as such: Every time she appears in the scene, I think of the most outrageous thing she could do in that moment, and make her do it. And then continue to do so as long as she's on camera. I'm absolutely unsurprised (and also very happy and amused) that she's turned out to be probably the most popular character, she's just...so much. I need to make more Xye content.
Speaking of which, while their profiles aren't up yet, take a look at Xye's family! They run the world's most corrupt casino and somehow no one's snitched...yet.

Zera does tend to fade into the background by comparison. But also, she wants to! She's the shadow to Xye's obnoxiously blinding light. They have such a fun dynamic lol. Every time I draw her, she gains more piercings, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
I wish I could cut away to the control room sometimes. The control crew tracks the team’s progress via charts and live updating maps, and the room is always CHAOS. Like you haven't seen the least of Lujang screaming at everyone else. Or Iki sighing "this is above my pay grade" every time something unprecedentedly bad happens during a race. Or the arguments that start when Janda asks him to get the sailors out of a pinch! Telaki is always in there trying to keep everyone calm and functioning as a team and rubbing her temple the whole time.
I love Telaki. She's my favourite side character actually. She's very excitable outside her job (and even inside it sometimes), and goes on rambles about cool exciting things (and also about bad taxi rides).
I would like to explore Folien I-San (the MC at the first afterparty) in more detail, because he’s A Character. Son of old money, dresses in gold, scandal follows him everywhere. He’s a mediocre singer at best but he’s conventionally attractive and has money, so he has forced his way into popularity. It's a shame I didn't remember to bring him back for another scene, lol.
I also want to explore Mx. Mo, the Sailing Federation's public relations face (and the one who facilitated both press conferences). They're everywhere where the Sail Fed needs to look good, and they do so much heavy lifting for the organisation.
ALSO, while the profiles aren't up, here are some other rival teams (the nice ones)!

Jinai is someone I associate with sunsets and the hues of precious antiques—gold, brass, maroon, velvety shades. This is naturally pointing to her status as a veteran of the sport (seasoned, weathered, in the "sunset" of her career), but also at the sense of a lustre tarnished by that weathering. Has hasn't lost her shine, she's decided to let it get obscured!

She has a fondness for storms, and I associate her with orcas, both details of which (I feel) gesture to her tendency to tear through a place/another's life and leave it changed for good...and for things to do the same to her. She's always been "go big or go home." Even though she says she made a choice to leave home, she knew from the start that there was no way she'd choose not to go. Everyone around her can sense a bit of that potency, that penchant for greatness—it's why she caught the eye of the sailing world. She can also be a bit of a wild card, running off and doing whatever she likes without any warning. Having that sort of reactiveness makes her dynamic with Xye incredibly fun for fans to follow in the media.

Anqien’s whole palette and aesthetic are inspired by shallow seawater: cyans and blues and flowing lines. Really, their core motif relates to that interplay of shallows and depths—their name is a bit of a pun – æ½œ (submerged/hidden) and æµ… (shallow) are both pronounced “qian”. They’re simultaneously easy to read—transparent, if you will—and also very well-trained to not talk about the things that they’ve been told they shouldn't. The complementary symbolism of the bottlenose dolphin also kind of points at how...they appear silly at times, but they are also a very discerning person who thinks hard about things.

This is a person who’s deceptively simple but actually hides a lot. It's a matter of survival that they don't express themself patently. I often associate the phrase “go with the flow” with them, and that is apt for their flexibility and “anything goes” attitude, but also (see their profile) as someone who will find an easier way around every predicament, if they can't immediately push through.

So, their outfits and fashion sense accent a lot of this symbolism, but the two party outfit sets have some extra stuff going on that gestures to the character development:

At the first party, Anqien's outfit is light, pale, subtle - they don't want to be conspicuous and they're really still learning to pull their weight. Jinai's dress is very plain and the lines hew close to her body. She doesn't have high hopes and doesn't want to take up space. Of course, I still think these outfits project their respective fashion sense.

At the second party, I think they both ramped it up since they were the actual champions, but there's also something kind of "aged like wine" about the outfits, or at least that was how I see them. Anqien has high contrasts in their outfit and the fabric feels heavier - black and white and a saturated purple. There's something regal about it. They're less scared to be seen and they're more able to make demands and act in their own interests. Jinai's outfit has way more volume and sparkle! Hints of gold for the gold medal, and the dress is a little more daring, with a sense of volume pointing at being willing to assert her presence, to stay put instead of running away, and draped fabric that feels looser, freer.

The song that plays at the first party that Jinai calls her “favourite song” is meant to be Seastorm. I thought it would be silly and pull the reader out of it if I mentioned this, but that was what was going through my head at the time.
Speaking of Seastorm, I previously wrote a post detailing my process of creating the song.
I totally pictured that Anqien never actually knew where the hero worship ended and the infatuation began. The feelings are all connected. This is mixed in with strong feelings of friendship and care and I guess when they started bringing Jinai meals was when they stopped seeing her as an unreachable idol, though they still admired her.
I could not decide what scene to draw for Chapter 23. The entire chapter is one big spoiler, haha.
Favourite chapters to write: Blue Dreamers (first afterparty), Future Past (flashback), Home Run (sailing back to Wulien).
Favourite line: "This was how she wanted to remember tonight, if she could remember it always. None of them were the people they had been before; all were only dancers and dreamers in this pulsating cerulean light."