The novel I’m currently writing takes place in a fictional time and place. I haven’t settled on a title as yet, but the working title is ‘Ravioli Rosie’. That may (or may not) change.
Something I’m finding fun (and occasionally challenging) is plucking gems from any time and place in the world’s actual history.
It made sense to me to have a unique clock, because time—not in the sense of a moment in history, but as in the passing of—plays an important role in this story set in a small island town where technology is at times primitive and often disrupted.
The word clock comes from the French word for bell, ‘cloche’. Previously, people would say ‘daegmael’, which means day measure. I think that actually makes more sense than bell!
Early clocks were obelisks and sundials that told the time using a light spot or shadow cast by the position of the sun. But then the Greeks came up with the water clock, or Clepsydra, which literally translates as water thief.
The process employed in the Clepsydra was to have water dripped or funneled into or out of a container or series of containers. As the water always took about the same amount of time to transfer, the water level would give a fairly good indication of what time it was. With satellite clocks a couple of millennia away, this was very useful even if it wasn’t very accurate, and unlike sundials and obelisks, water clocks could tell the time at night and indoors.
Some Clepsydras would even have a statue or object in the container, which would rise as the container would fill. This got my imagination racing! What exactly could pop up? And whose job was it to replenish the water? If they were late, did that set the whole day off course? Ah, and what if somebody wanted other people to think it was a different time of day?
Also fun to contemplate, water clocks can measure each day in multiples of twelve, adjusted for the time of year—a summer day is much longer than a winter day. And anyone with, say, a pendulum clock that measures time as units of 24 hours, would have a very different time.
Oh, and yes, someone in Ravioli Rosie’s town has a pendulum clock. Let the implications of that play out!
Why is time important to the story, you might wonder? The story is very much about kindness. In fact, it fits nicely into the relatively new genre ‘hopepunk’—how can you not love a genre that has the word hope in it?
Time is a kindness. And time seems to fly by ever faster. We perhaps all might need to pay more attention to how we use it. Too often we take it for granted, and yet running out of time is the one thing we can all count on.