The Ordinary

It feels odd to write about normal things. I'm so used to digging for the fantastic and the bizarre that I sometimes overlook the common things that lie around me. Like the afghan on my bed. It's all brown and cream zigzags, made by my grandfather. He took up crochet after my grandmother passed away, I think as a way to just fill the time.

I tend to gloss over the ordinary stuff, because some part of me always things that normal = dull. And I don't want my writing to be dull. So I wind up writing about things that aren't ordinary. I write about girls who fall through mirrors into strange wonderlands or boys who walk through enchanted doors into whole, other lives.  I don't write about the postal worker, so tired after a shift that all he wants to do is go home, have a beer and hang out with his bulldog on the couch while watching Antiques Roadshow. I don't generally write about the retail clerk or the auto mechanic or the retiree who are just living quiet, ordinary lives because to me they just don't spark my imagination.

It doesn't mean that oridinary people aren't worth writing about. It's just that I don't like writing about ordinary stuff because I think I'm bad at it.

And we are our own worst critics. Aren't we?

But who knows? Maybe this year, I'll write about someone or something ordinary. Stranger things have happened.