It’s been a while since I’ve used the “Eggy Toast” moniker, but I’ve revived it for this blog because I didn’t want to use something content-specific like “BLOG ABOUT WRITING” or “Pretentious Hipsterism.” Not that the blog won’t cover either of those topics. It probably will. But I want to leave it open to write about whatever topic interests me at the moment. I’m capricious like that.
Where does “Eggy Toast” come from? Well, in addition to being a delightful addition to any breakfast, it is also a song title from the album Mike and Rich: Expert Knob Twiddlers. It’s a good album, although it’s been roughly a decade now since I’ve actually listened to it. That’s kind of depressing to think about. I was a college student back then, angst-ridden and unsure about the future. Now I’m 30 years old, I have a family, and still I’m angst-ridden and unsure about the future. When I first listened to Expert Knob Twiddlers, it was exciting, new music to me. Quite cutting edge for the late 1990’s. Now I will hunt it down again on the Internet and listen to it out of nostalgia, and part of me will pine for the bygone days of the “intelligent dance music” era while the other part of me wonders how I listened to so much of that music without losing my hearing.
That’s the phase of my life I’ve entered into, I guess. Now that I’m thirty, I find myself more and more prone to nostalgia because I have more and more experiences to be nostalgic about. It’s scary to find myself recollecting my college years and realizing that they were, in fact, a decade ago. In the decade since, my life has gone off in a direction that I wouldn’t have expected back then. I have a family now. I have a house in the suburbs. I have a salaried office job. I am NOT, as I had envisioned, a reclusive writer living in a dilapidated apartment in the city and trying to drink away a crippling depression.
That’s a good thing.
There is one realization I came to recently, though, and it was that I had all but abandoned the one dream I had held onto since childhood: that I would one day be a writer. I realized, too, that unlike what I had envisioned before, I do not need to be a poverty-stricken, miserable recluse to accomplish that goal. I did not and should not expect to make a living writing what I want to write. In fact, freeing myself of that expectation would allow me to truly write for myself instead of for the expectation of profit. So I decided to start writing again. Then I quickly had a small collection of short stories, which I started submitting for publication. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to have one of my short stories (“The Old Ones”) accepted for inclusion in the Shadowcast Audio Anthology. It didn’t pay money, but I didn’t care. People would hear and read my story, and hopefully some of them would enjoy it. I was elated.
I’ve continued to work on writing short stories and I’ve continued to submit the completed ones for publication. So far I’ve gotten a few rejections. I’ve had a few bouts of writer’s block and thought to myself that maybe I was delusional in thinking I could be a writer even as a hobby. I’ve stuck with it, though, and I’ll continue to stick with it. Why? Because the alternative of not having a dream to work toward is far more depressing. That’s the real danger of growing older: thinking that you’ll only ever accomplish what you’ve already accomplished. It doesn’t have to be true at any age.
Eggy Toast 