hidden_variable

Snowflake challenge #10: In your own space, talk about one of your fandom firsts. This could be your first fandom, your first fandom friend, the first fanwork you created, the first fanwork you interacted with... The options are endless!

My previous post actually had a lot of “firsts” in it: first fanfic I read, first story posted to AO3, and first time participating in Yuletide. When I saw this challenge, I thought about just linking to that same post again, but that felt a bit like cheating. Then I had another idea.

I said in my earlier post that I had never thought of writing down my fannish story ideas until a few years ago, but that isn’t quite true; there was something I wrote down in high school, almost exactly 30(!) years ago. Backstory: for English class in my junior year, everyone was required to memorize and perform a Shakespearian soliloquy; I did the “to be or not to be” speech from Hamlet. Toward the end of that year, there was a class trip in which we spent several days canoeing and camping along a river, the better to learn about Teamwork and Leadership and suchlike. The Hamlet soliloquy was still burned into my memory at this point, and the words kept swirling around in my head as we paddled along, until I eventually turned them into a… sort of canoeing-themed Shakespeare spoof? It’s not really a fanfic, but let’s call it my first transformative work. I later submitted it to a poetry contest, where it was deemed ineligible for a prize due to not exactly being an original work, but it did get published in the school’s literary magazine.

Thanks to the joys of moving, I recently unearthed a copy of said literary magazine in a box labeled something like “misc. office stuff,” so I am able to reproduce my version of the soliloquy here. Putting it under a cut so that no one needs to subject themselves to it unnecessarily:


To canoe, or not to canoe: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The mud and sogginess of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a river of troubles
And by paddling ignore them. To go home, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The backache, and the thousand dirty socks
That feet are heir to! ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To go home, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of comfort what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off these smelly wetsuits,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes canoe trips of so long life:
For who would bear sore muscles and fatigue,
Th’ oppressive cold, the proud wind’s contumely,
The pangs of frozen boots, the warmth’s delay,
The insolence of neoprene, and the spurns
That patient water of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a warm shower? Who would dry bags bear,
To grunt and sweat under canoeing gear,
But that the dread of something off the river,
The well-remembered country, from whose bourn
No traveler comes unscathed, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear our new discomforts
Than return to others we know all too well?
Thus cowardice gives endurance to us all,
And thus the native hue of civilization
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of escape,
And expeditions of great pitch and moment,
With this regard let currents catch their boats,
And gain the name of action.