Imagine you're a writer. Actually in order for this post to be relatable I'll have to assume you are. So, you're a writer. You're a writer and you've written extensively about particular people in a particular place. You can close your eyes and see this place in your mind's eye, an amalgam of many other places you've been or seen, so that the sum of them is both real and not real. Real in that you can go back up the thread to determine what real place inspired it, but not real in that you couldn't get in your car and go there.
You've written extensively about this place, over a period of years while the real places you live your life change all the time. You'll never go back to the dorm where you lived in college, or the apartment in downtown _____, but you can go back to this fictional place and nothing will have changed. You can take it with you. And usually that's enough, but sometimes you're overcome with a wave of longing for it. This place that doesn't exist, but that feels just as real to you as all those other places you lived once and can't go back to-- your childhood home before everything went to hell, the apartment where you lived with your brother you don't speak to anymore. You can't go back to those places, either. They'd belong to someone else now if you did, full of someone else's furniture and someone else's life.
Just... what do you do when you live in a series of temporary places? What do you do when you're homesick for somewhere that's never existed? How do you know when to stop moving? How do you know you're safe?
I wrote this post years ago and it was the oldest thing in my drafts and I’m releasing it now because I am homesick for Aziraphale’s bookshop as I thought of it when I wrote fanfiction for all the years I loved Good Omens. That place, that world that I carried with me without a home of my own for years, got ripped away from me by someone who first spent several years cannibalizing the fandom presence with just enough plausible deniability to get away with it before turning out to be an abuser. I watched the beautiful world the fandom around me created be appropriated for profit and I couldn’t do anything about it. And I want to go home but home isn’t a real thing, it’s a concept adults use to keep children in line and abusive men lord over vulnerable women.
Anyway. If you ever loved my fanfiction or the posts I made on here, you should know that I finally received the kick in the ass I needed to start writing original fiction. You can follow me at @anthonymire to keep up with my progress as I try to finish things, shop it around, and build community of other writers. If you’re writing original fiction yourself I’ll probably follow you back. Let’s build a house of our own.
