Vox Felicitas I — Humble Beginnings

So Britain’s been under lockdown for the past four weeks: apparently there’s an unpleasant bug that’s been going around. As a result, in my infinite wisdom, I have made a decision to do something I either should have done a long time ago, or really shouldn’t be doing for the sake of humanity’s continued sanity.

That decision is to start a weekly blog.

As you can probably tell, that blog goes by the name of ‘Vox Felicitas’. “Why would you call it that?”, I hear you think. Because it’s (probably) Latin for ‘Voice of Happiness’. Many of the greatest things in the world have Latin in them somewhere. The Magna Carta; Jus ad Bellum (and its counterpart, Jus in Bello); the Deus ex Machina; anything written by William Shakespeare. Now, I’m not going to pretend I’m a Latin savant. I’m following a trend.

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Now that that’s over and done with, I’m going to open this blog by making a confession.

I’m doing this because I want to try and make other people happy. Making other people happy has been the fundament of every goal I’ve ever set myself. It’s why I write fiction, despite common sense. Literature has been part of my life literally from the moment I was born: my mother originally wanted to call me Zak, as in Zaknafein Do’Urden, father of one of the main protagonists in the Forgotten Realms shared fantasy universe. Truth be told, I’m a little bit bummed out that I got stuck with ‘Harry’ instead, but as they say in Italy, what must be will be.

When I was a toddler, my Dad had a massive book of children’s poems and short stories he’d read from every night until I was about five. Now, most people in my generation, when the words ‘Michael’ and ‘Rosen’ are put into the same sentence, probably imagine a particular type of video on the Internet. In this video, the man himself makes a speech composed from many small clips of live performances, slapped together into what amounts to a mindless, borderline insane ramble. I have a vastly different association with Mr. Rosen to the nefarious YouTube Poop — more specifically, one of his poems, Don’t Put Mustard in the Custard, was always my fan favourite from Dad’s children’s anthology.

When I got to primary school, my first real literary project was based upon the Grand Theft Auto video games. Yes, those same games the previous generations always dreaded — the games where I would commit such antics as picking up a prostitute from the streets, then blowing her brains out because I was convinced she was stealing the cash I earned through hard labour (read: military-grade hardware-assisted omnicide). Anyway, the premise of this literary project was, for all intents and purposes, a drug deal gone wrong that snowballs, through a convoluted trail of events, into the outbreak of World War Three. Fortunately for the rest of the world, the combatants were kind enough to build spaceships to move everyone into orbit before slugging it out against each other in an apocalyptic battle to the finish.

That story was never going to win the Mann Booker Prize any time soon. But it was the first real sign of my two great loves — writing and gaming — passions of mine that have persisted up to the present day. This was the first time they came together to manifest … something. I really want to say ‘greatness’, but that’d be pushing it. Oh well, it would probably have made a better gangster film than Gotti.

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Fast forward sixteen years, and my love of the literary has blossomed into a passion for writing that has come to envelop my life. I’ve picked up a Creative Writing and History bachelor’s degree from the University of Chichester. I’ve got no less than two friendship circles focused around writing, with one being a virtual book club and the other focused on writing an ongoing shared science fiction universe. I even have a book self-published: Ardent Red, the first in a whole series I’ve got planned out. I’ve got another big project I’m writing through at the moment, dubbed the Tertas Saga, a fantasy series heavily inspired by both Dungeons & Dragons and the Dragonlance Chronicles, which I started reading last year.

I love writing, and I’ve loved it since my age could be counted on one hand — but I’d be a liar if I said that the past two years haven’t really put that love to the test. Since I left university, I’ve been struggling with both finding work and dealing with bitter depression, both of which have been fuelling the other. The past two years have been a painful cycle of taking action to push myself forward, said action getting me nowhere, wallowing in misery, getting a pep-talk from my dad (who has been absolutely awesome, by the way), then taking action again. I get angry and wonder whether it’s worth taking any action at all to begin with, which leads to me getting lackadaisical. And when there are bills, taxes, services to be paid, that’s not good for anyone, and especially not my poor old dad who gets stuck with the paying.

I’ve lost count of the number of times this cycle has made me consider giving up on writing altogether. I’ve given real thought to just burning my degree and settling into a life of working in the lowliest jobs before retirement, death and an eternity of having the only memento to eighty-odd years of existence being a slab of carved rock in a graveyard. I got caught up in one of these evil thought patterns when I stumbled upon a piece I wrote and published on WritingForums last year, entitled Lament of an Inner Demon.

It’s a flash fiction story which is best summarised as me shouting abuse at myself, a rant set off by an incident involving my brother last year. By every account it’s a pathetic ramble written during a moment of weakness — a thinly veiled vent for the rage against the self. But the response it elicited from my friends, who saw right through my attempts to disguise it as an experiment in character development, was a great relief. They were there for me, to let me know they were there if I needed a shoulder to cry on. They were there because of my previous writings with them, writings which they truly, wholeheartedly enjoyed reading, and which I enjoyed creating with them.

Then I got an email from another good friend of mine. I’d made some remark about the coronavirus pandemic, about how the person in Wuhan who first thought bats were good eating must be kicking themselves round about now. The remark made my friend laugh, and in the same email she suggested that, maybe, I start a blog.

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This isn’t a maudlin sob story about how much I suck. At least, I don’t think it is. It’s the fruit of a great deal of thinking on my part about what is the point of my writing. Which brings me touching down ever so gently onto the point of this entire blog — and indeed the whole point of me writing anything. Make people happy. Inspire people. Tell them that the world doesn’t suck. Remind them that at the end of every tunnel, there is a glimmer of light, no matter how long and far below the earth that tunnel goes.

For that reason, I’d like to conclude this first issue of my blog with a note for all who are worried about the coronavirus. I’ve seen a few people getting bored and depressed, being stuck in the lockdown. We’re an inherently social species: we love getting out into the world, meeting friends, making new ones, finding love. A lockdown is not conducive to any of that — and as someone who has trouble with social interactions as it is, I understand the pain. But never lose hope!

Britain, and indeed most of the world in which we live, is facing a challenge the likes of which it’s not faced since the Second World War. We’re being sequestered in our homes so that the brave can wage war against an invisible enemy. Nurses, doctors, police officers, firefighters and all other essential workers stand their ground now against a leviathan, just as soldiers once fought on the beaches, the hills and the streets against the tyrannous Third Reich. Back in those days, many would wonder whether their sons, fathers, brothers, cousins, grandfathers, uncles and friends were ever going to return from the battle. Great was the collective relief of our society on the eighth of May, 1945, the day the war in Europe came to an end.

A terrible conflict was fought by our grandfathers and great grandfathers so that now we can take our stand against the coronavirus, the new evil empire. We make our stand now, we make our sacrifices, so that future generations can thrive as we have in the post-war era. And when our V-E Day comes, we will breathe our sigh of relief and come out of this crisis better than we ever were before.

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I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing the first issue of Vox Felicitas. I hope you’ve all enjoyed reading it as much as I have creating it; if you have, I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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