I was recently asked by an old friend who knew me as a devoted Christian, what happened? "You had such a wonderful relationship with God. He was your father and we could all see how much you loved him and how he loved you.”

This is my response.

I didn't move away from God as you put it, or backslide, or run away because I was angry. The God that I believed in was never there in the first place. My belief was challenged by real events in the real world—which forced me to look beyond the belief and into reality itself and deal with what was true and what was just made up. By letting go of that belief in God, in computer terms, I simply uninstalled an application that tried to take over my hardware and not allow me to function as I was meant to function.

As to the “father” … in my mind I had created the perfect father based on deficits in my own life. That father was passionate, gentle, hilarious, creative, sensitive, wise, devoted, loyal, and he loved me deeper than I loved myself.

God joked with me, he called me Toots, he cuddled with me, he was physical in ways I wasn’t allowed to be as a gay man, and he comforted me when I was down. Yet when I needed him most—when the universe came at me with real-life stuff—like a meteor crashing to earth—God wasn’t there. And that’s because he was “never” there. I was there.

As a writer, I create characters all the time, and they’re powerful to me. They “exist!” I laugh with them, I cry with them. When I wrote The Children of the Night, there was one paragraph—one paragraph—that was so hard to get through it took me over three hours. And half of that was spent weeping—deeply sobbing because of the events taking place in that character’s life.

I love Timothy, Jeff, Julian, Sean, Tony, Pilgrim, Faithful, and all the other characters I’ve created over the years. I can tell you things about them that aren’t even in the books. I know how they feel about situations beyond their stories, the same way J.K. Rowling knew Professor Dumbledore was gay even though it was never mentioned.

Just like that, I loved the father I created. I see him reflected so often in my thoughts as the highest form of me. But he’s still a character that I created in the story of my life. I would never presume that the characters in the books I write are real. But they’re real to me.

In reality, I choose to “keep God,” knowing that he is a character—but one that I find beautifully attractive on so many levels. But he’s “my God” and nobody else’s.

Harry Potter is a story that has captivated millions around the world, and we all relate to him. We joke about him, we have memes, and we can tell the stories in our heads. He’s real to us, though he’s not real in the universe.

That’s what happened.