Time (past time!) for another “idea to book” post, this one about how Facets of the Bench came to be.
Facets of the Bench takes place in 1927 and it’s all about love of place. It’s also about making a life that we want, even if there are some unexpected twists along the way.
Elise, Whitby, and jet
The beginning of this book, the first idea for it, comes because I’ve had the great pleasure of being good friends with Elise Matthesen for over twenty years now. (We knew each other online first. But we particularly bonded over a public shared reading of The Young Visiters at a small convention in 2001.)
Elise is a jewellery maker, using wirework techniques with a dazzling array of stones and beads. Elise is also responsible for a number of minor and a couple more major corrections to the stones in the Mysterious Fields trilogy. It is excellent to have friends with expertise if you’re a writer.)
Anyway, Elise had been reading my books (never something I expect of my friends, but I’m delighted when they do). She’d been arguing for a little I really needed to do something with Whitby. I knew enough not to argue, but figuring out a plot that would work there took me a little while.
Whitby has a fascinating history. It has long been a seaside town, supported by fishing and some amount of longer distance trade. But it’s also home to a key source of jet (and the main one for the United Kingdom). Originally, the jet all came from pieces washed up on the beach. But at the height of the jet craze, there were also mines a little bit inland. The beach runs from Whitby about seven miles south to Robin Hood’s Bay.
Jet
What jet craze? Well, after the death of Prince Albert (Queen Victoria’s husband) in 1861, she wore black and remained in formal mourning for the rest of her life. She also dictated what stones could be worn in court settings. Mostly that meant jet. It was polished and carved and cut into all sorts of different shapes, and it remained tremendously popular into the 20th century. The fashion for jet began tapering off around 1900. The Great War (and the tremendous number of deaths) meant that by 1920, there were only a few jet workshops active.
There’s a great page from English Heritage (with photos) talking about the history of jet and Whitby. These days there are a number of jet carvers working again in Whitby.
St Hild
Oh, and there’s the other part of Whitby. The authorial Discord has a number of smart people with fascinating knowledge on them. They include a group of people who like the term ‘church nerds’ as a description.
When half a dozen people tell me that St Hild is fascinating and could there be something about her in a book, I am inclined to listen. (St Hild is indeed fascinating. While the now ruined Abbey in Whitby is not of her era, it’s in the same place.) I managed to work in about 11 paragraphs about St Hild and her work and approach to the world. This is approximately 10 more than most histories of the period do.
Griffin
Next, we have Griffin. At the time I wrote Facets of the Bench, Griffin had already appeared in two other books. He’s a minor character in Shoemaker’s Wife (which takes place in 1920), and he also appears in Point By Point (in 1926). In both cases, he’s acting for Albion’s Courts as a relatively senior specialist.
Griffin is also an ambulatory wheelchair user. As he explains in the course of Facets of the Bench, it’s something similar to an autoimmune condition triggered by magical and physical shock during the Great War. (That kind of sudden physical shock can do the same thing without magic). He has trouble with muscle weakness, especially in his legs, and with stamina and exhaustion. A chair means he can do a lot more – so long as he can get somewhere in the chair.
Going somewhere new when you rely on a chair (or even crutches, as he also uses) is a constant series of judgement calls and choices about navigating the world. Griffin has a lot of it figured out at home. But in Whitby he needs to rely a bit more on people who know the town.
Griffin and disability
The other thing about Griffin is that I wanted to write someone who has, in many ways, made an excellent life for himself that takes his disability into account. However, at the start of the book, he’s in something of a professional limbo. He could stay in his current role indefinitely, but there’s the potential for something more, something he wants very badly. Until the events of the book, he is trying to figure out what might lead to a change.
That’s a problem with long-term disability we don’t always talk about a lot. It’s one thing to make a life that’s comfortable and good and has wonderful things in it. But maybe we also get stuck, not expanding when we actually can.
Griffin does have to deal with other people’s assumptions about what he can and can’t do. But he also has support from others who respect his skills, love how he approaches solving problems, and who enjoy his love of his home and his work.
Trellech
That brings us tidily to Trellech. Trellech is Albion’s main magical city. It’s actually built on the bones of an older city, abandoned around 1260.
At its height after the Norman Conquest, the city had about 20,000 people. (It was for a while the third largest city in Great Britain.) It provided munitions manufacturing for the de Clare family. When they fell from power and in the century after, it became a much smaller village. (And remained one, in our world.) In Albion, around the time of the Pact in the 1480s, it was built up as the centre of magical government and organisation.
Because it’s the centre of Albion’s Ministry, Temple of Healing, and Guilds, many people living in Trellech weren’t born there. Griffin, however, is a child of the city, and he’s loved it since he knew it was a thing he could love. He’d utterly enmeshed in Trellech’s traditions (seen both in Facets of the Bench and in Mari Lwyd 1927, last year’s solstice extra). He has his favourite bakeries for all sorts of good, including Welsh cakes.
And Griffin knows just about everyone. By the time Annice comes to Trellech with him, she has become rather amused by it, that no matter where he takes her, he knows someone. Not just knows – but he’s on friendly terms.
I really loved writing a book that got to spend more time with Trellech as a character, as a place that has its own opinions about the world, and its own rhythms.
Do these things intrigue you? Check out Facets of the Bench. While it features some people who appear in other books, it’s a great place to start with Albion.
