On Being Ordinary

It’s a tough old gig, isn’t it? Being ordinary.

I think it’s fair to assume that most people will know how it feels. To be one of the masses, puttering through life in the background, with the occasional walk through or cameo into something bigger but generally just the background noise of life, unheard, unseen and mostly unappreciated. And whenever the larger forces of the universe collide to make something big and splashy happen, it’s always the ordinary folks who end up shafted by it. It’s enough of a bother up here in the real world – so imagine what it must be like being the background noise in a fantasy kingdom with all the perils of plague, war, magical catastrophe and attack by random winged beasties to contend with as one tries to get by in life. Straightforward medieval peasant life with new weird and obscure ways to die thrown in – fun times for all!

I’ve often thought being a background character in a fantasy novel must be the hardest gig in all of literature, especially for the poor benighted red shirts of the fantasy world – the ordinary soldiers. To be fair, the variety of terrible fates that tend to await the nameless chain-mailed masses means at least it probably won’t be a dull way to end one’s days but still, being roasted to a crisp by a miffed dragon or trampled underfoot by a giant, raging dark lord of evil grown to enormous size in his black lacquered armour, or swallowed whole by a deeply cross and slimy swamp monster probably isn’t the recognition for a life of hard graft that one was looking for.

It’s strange the things that gets one thinking. And one day I just happened to think – I wonder what would happen if one of those put upon, perpetually doomed guards decided he’d had enough?

Hello Fodder. Hello The Disposable.

Because, for me, Fodder is the voice of the ordinary. He has no special powers. He isn’t particularly talented, he’s not magnificently handsome or hugely intelligent – he’s just someone trying to get by in life who gets tired of being trampled on by everybody else along the way. He’s someone who feels strongly that life should be fair and nobody should be excluded simply on the grounds of their birth. He’s a person who feels that everyone deserves an equal chance.

And that’s really one of the reasons I wanted to write this book – to wave a flag for the ordinary folks, of whatever ilk. To show that just because a person isn’t a flashy, charismatic thing of beauty doesn’t mean that they don’t matter.  That ordinary people are just as capable and competent as their shinier counterparts. And that being ordinary doesn’t preclude one from doing extraordinary things, in whatever realm they happen to live.

So let’s hear it for the ordinary. And maybe, just maybe, when the wind is fair and the threads of fate are tangled in the right direction, they’ll get the chance to prove they’ve always been extraordinary after all.