Young Writers Society

LMS IV is looming and I am one of the many raving lunatics people waiting to take up the challenge, so I thought it was time to start planning. My idea is still fairly flimsy, but I think it's just solid enough that I can transfer it from my head to paper (well, to screen).

Here's a mysterious summary

Hildegarde Sneal has lived at Penbrook House for as long as she can remember, together with her twin brother and a tangle of other children. The water runs cold, the beds are hard, and the matrons are harsh, but Hildegarde has always made the best of it. She knows it isn't a forever thing, that one day she'll leave to become a posie - a beloved companion to one of the masked, mysterious degas, the fae of high society.

Yet when the day comes, she isn't quite ready for it. Wrenched from her brother and ferried far into the north, she must find her place among the degas of the Virsk estate. The family is warm, their gifts are lavish, and the outings are exciting, but notes of doubt are everywhere. Why do the other posies speak so little? Why won't her brother respond to her letters? What secret sits in the tower upon the lake?

Biggest of all is the mystery of Daisy, the older girl who dines every evening with the Virsk family but is posie to none of them. As the reality around Hildegarde grows ever more fractured, and as countless secrets unfold, the two girls develop a bond that may save both of their souls.

And here's a summary that's full of spoilers

The degas are long-lived creatures capable of magic, deception, and powers beyond measure. What they are not capable of is feeling. The emotions they have are muted - they experience nothing with the vitality of human beings, whose passion and anger can level cities.

There is nothing the degas covet more than the ability to feel. The means by which they achieve it are delicate and precise. They need a human - a child, preferably; someone trusting. They need to care for them. They need to earn the child's devotion, their love - and then they must perform a ritual that entangles their souls together, so that everything the human feels becomes theirs.

Posies are humans who have been entangled with degas. They are blank, uninterested, and they feel nothing - everything they are is filtered through to their degas. It is this fate that Hildegarde is bound for, but she doesn't even know it.

The rest of my details about the story are quite vague. I know that Daisy is a posie, but to a half-dead, comatose degas that the Virsk family are straining to bring back to consciousness. I know that the plot is going to centre around Daisy and Hildegarde trying to escape the estate (in the hopes of finding Dante, Hildegarde's brother), which can only be done if they kill Daisy's degas, who she cannot stray far from. I know that things are not going to go smoothly.

But I am e x c i t e d to write.

Actually, I don't think the degas family is known as the Virsk family. They don't have distinct second names - they're just attached as part of their given name, which is usually long and flouncy and a bit unpronounceable. I think the degas to which Hildegarde is given will be called Parismatreau, but she'll just call them Paris.

Another note on degas - they don't procreate as humans do. They're created by degas before them, and their core ingredients determine the family they belong to. Given that there's no procreation, degas have no biological sex and tend to be agender, though they often present themselves as lavishly male or female - it's part of their culture of emulating humans. Degas with posies do tend to end up strongly identifying with the same gender as the human, as a side-effect of the entanglement.

This sounds very interesting! The connections between degas and posies sound incredibly unique, and I'm curious to see what else you come up with for them. Also, I'm a sucker for friendship and not romance being the center of a book, so that's cool as well. You have a really cool story on your hands.

Thanks, Saen! I'm looking forward to it. I'm really excited to develop the whole culture surrounding degas and posies, and the weird etiquette that they have - I'm thinking it's considered really uncouth for a degas to talk to another person's posie, but that posie-to-posie communication is generally considered okay. I just can't wait to get into the detail.

I'm so excited to read this, especially since seeing your planning in the WFP of earlier!

Question: so I know Hildegard and Daisy are eventually going to bond, even though at first Daisy's pretty distant. But how is that going to work with Hildegard becoming a posie and not really feeling her own emotions? Or is this something that won't happen until later, after she and Daisy have started bonding? I'm assuming Daisy can sort of perhaps feel a bit more since her degas is in a comaish thing, although then again maybe not.

On that note, how does that work? Is she more in control of her emotions/more feeling of her emotions bc of that or more cut off from them than ever?

@BlueAfrica I'm excited you're excited! I can't wait to start writing it.

Re: Hildegarde becoming a posie, that's not actually an immediate thing. The entanglement process doesn't happen until the degas has completely won over the human's trust, because the closer their relationship at the time the entanglement is performed, the better quality their connection will be. As such, Hildegarde is still going to have her usual emotions throughout the book, because she's more of a posie in training than an actual one. Parismatreau is trying to win her over. She'll be the one to motivate the friendship.

The impact of Kesec being comatose on Daisy is something I'm still figuring out. I imagine on the days where Kesec is weakest, she can feel a bit more, but most of the time she's still blank and disinterested. I'm kind of going to draw from depression when writing posies - I imagine it's that sort of feeling, where absolutely nothing engages you and you're just completely unmoored. They have to learn to act.

Omg that's so much more heartbreaking that the degas has to win their posie's trust first. Like, are they even conflicted about it??? Like you're getting closer and closer to this person but also you're sort of emotionally cut off to begin with so maybe it doesn't bother you that you're only gaining their trust to use them. Do you, the degas, ever feel that betrayal after you've become entangled, or by then is it too late for your posie to even really realize what just happened???

@BlueAfrica Most degas are able to go through with it precisely because they don't really feel guilt and shame with the strength that a person would, but yep, feeling betrayal in the aftermath can be a massive problem. I'm going to delve into that particularly with Daisy's degas, because I imagine that he adored Daisy (as much as a degas can adore anything) as she was before their souls were entangled together. Seeing her turn blank and uninterested in everything would've crushed him. I kind of sympathise with the degas, actually, because the only way for them to escape a passive existence is to rob someone else's right to feel. There's no situation where everybody wins.

I've not fully figured out yet how emotional entanglement works. It may just be that everything the posie should be feeling gets filtered to their degas instead. Things that would've made them happy or angry or sad resonate with their degas rather than them, hence why degas keep their posies in the lap of luxury. I'm also wondering if the entanglement goes further than that, though. If their souls and minds are tied together, it may that the posie reacts to changes in their degas' life as if it were their own, but that their emotions are still instantly filtered. That feels a bit complicated, though, so I don't know whether to scrap that and keep it simple.

I mean, it makes sense and honestly I don't feel like it would be too complicated to write? Bc the degas are still the ones feeling everything, whether it comes from something in their lives or their posies'. Like the actual OCCURRENCE of them feeling-not-really-feeling something from their own lives, their posies getting the actual feelings from it, and it getting filtered right back to the degas is complicated, but I think actually writing it wouldn't be any more complicated than writing the posies' feelings into the degas.

Yes, I suppose. I'll see how I go. The mechanics of degas and posies strikes me as the kind of thing that I'll refine in a second draft anyway, so I'm not going to worry about it too much for now. I'll go where my gut takes me.

Some sketches of Daisy and Paris because reasons

Gosh darn I envy these sketches. <3

Aww thank you Light!! <3

Omg same!!! They're so beautiful!!!

Thank you! I want to do some proper full-body sketches of Paris and Hildegarde next. I have to draw Dante and his terrible bowl cut at some point too.