Genesis to revelation

I read most of Good Omens several years ago while staying at someone's house, but I didn't quite manage to finish it before I left. Since I was enjoying it, I made a mental note to get my own copy; but somehow, for various reasons, that never quite materialised over the years, which is probably just as well, since it would no doubt have disappeared in 2016. And then, somehow - I'm not sure exactly how - I found out about the Kickstarter for the graphic novel; and I thought, that's it. I'm in.

The graphic novel version is sumptuous. There's no other word to describe it. The original text had to be quite significantly cut to get it into that format, but that has been very well done; they've kept all the bits that made me laugh the most (and, honestly, for a novel about the end of the world, it is extremely funny). The flow of the story is unaffected, and the artwork is superb. It's also beautifully presented. I don't normally buy hardbacks, but I was happy to make an exception for this one.

For those who aren't familiar with the story, it is mostly about the two blokes on the front, and even if you have never read it I don't need to tell you which is which in the image. Aziraphale is an angel. Crowley is a demon. They've been officially enemies for so long that they have quietly become friends; and both of them have very good reasons for not wanting the world to end right now. So they team up to try to stop it happening. Since this book was written by a pair of atheists (albeit, I think, sympathetic ones), parts of it are quite wildly off theologically, but it doesn't stop it from being a very fun concept and a great read.

Now, you know me. I'm a character person. Give me a pair of characters as well-written as these two, and I'm not only going to enjoy them as written, I'm going to want to take them further. I have not, in fact, previously written any Good Omens fanfic; however, I'm about to start now.

I'm going to say now that most Good Omens fanfic ships these two (for those not familiar with that term, it means it puts them in a romantic relationship). I am not doing that. When I write fanfic, I have to make it, at the very least, compatible with canon, because otherwise it's not fanfic at all; it's an original story but you borrowed the names. It's not the characters themselves. We know nothing from canon about Crowley's sexual preferences (if indeed he has any), but at one point it is specifically said about Aziraphale that most people assume he is gay, but he is in fact not. There does seem to be a general tendency in fanfic to make everyone gay without fear or favour, but I've never done that. If someone is canonically gay, that's absolutely fair enough, but if they're very specifically said to be "not gay" (whether that means straight or asexual - it's not clear in Aziraphale's case), then I'm not going to break the character by going against that. And, in any case, you've already got a complicated friendship between an angel and a demon - is there anything that could be more interesting than that?

Aziraphale owns a bookshop; it plays on his name, so it's called "A Z Fell & Co" (and, along with my graphic novel, I also picked up a rather snazzy pair of socks with a book design and that name emblazoned around the top band). Crowley owns a flat, but he's hardly ever in it, so it immediately made sense to set the story in Aziraphale's bookshop. While it is technically a shop, it's really a repository for Aziraphale's extensive book collection, and he does everything possible to discourage his customers from actually buying anything. So my initial idea was to have a pair of customers enter the shop while Crowley was visiting, and assorted high jinks following on from that. But, while I was thinking about the set-up for that, this little montage entered my head.

Crowley walks into the shop. Aziraphale greets him, automatically goes to put the kettle on, and then realises he is out of biscuits. He tells Crowley this, apologetically, because being a demon doesn't stop anyone enjoying a biscuit. Crowley shrugs and wanders off into Aziraphale's kitchen at the back of the shop, and comes out with flour, sugar, butter, chocolate chips, maybe a few other ingredients, a small mixing bowl, a wooden spoon, and one of those rather nice decorated tins that were around in the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries (very roughly). Aziraphale raises an eyebrow. Crowley grins and proceeds to mix the ingredients in the bowl on the shop counter. He then moulds the dough into biscuits and pops them into the tin. Then he levitates the tin, concentrates, and engulfs it in flames for a few minutes... resulting in fresh, perfectly cooked biscuits.

Aziraphale concedes, reluctantly, that summoning infernal fire in his shop hasn't actually done any harm. After all, they're good biscuits. Crowley says, "You could do the same trick. You can summon the eternal flame, can't you?"

Aziraphale demurs, not entirely sure one ought to bake biscuits with it. At which point the customers walk in... and we're back to the point where I was originally going to start the story.

And this is precisely why I like writing fanfic as well as my own original work. With your own characters, you define who they are, where they're likely to be found, what sort of things they do, and so on; but with someone else's characters, you don't have that freedom. You have initial constraints. The challenge then becomes one of working within those constraints to find new and interesting things for the characters to do, which would certainly have occurred to the original authors had they taken it into their heads to put the characters in that situation. It's a little bit like writing poetry, except that the constraints are not of rhyme or metre but of pre-formed character, and therefore they're much more subtle but no less strict.

Anyone for a biscuit?