New Adventures

It is time I've made some changes. Since July, 2007, I've been writing blog posts about gaming and the game trade. It started as a place to share thoughts, but it turned into a book and so much more. 

 I have learned a tremendous amount through the give and take this dialogue has provided. Certainly I am not the best game store owner, but I'm probably the best person to report on the topic. I want to continue that in a new way. 

For four years, we've been planning a return to Mexico. We spent several months on the road through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras in 2018 and we've been yearning to return. I'm on day 1,022 of online Spanish lessons. This will be a five year mission to explore Mexico. To seek a new life in a new civilization. 

For me this is remote work, managing the store while on the road. This is going to be exciting! It would take very little for me to have to drop everything and fly home. The plan has a lot of inherent failure points, the biggest being "rigs" big enough to live in are also too big for a lot of Mexico. It's going to be tight! 

This might be a fiasco and if you join me, you'll have a front row seat, including the challenges of true remote business management, where you can't drive 30 minutes to your business to fix a problem. 

The schedule is six months on the road, six months off, so there will be fun travel interspersed with damage control, if any, back home. Where in Mexico? All of it. We have 152 Pueblos Magicos sites we want to visit plus some bonus UNESCO world heritage destinations. I imagine we'll also take suggestions. 

I want to use something like Patreon for subscribers. I'll continue to write regularly for Patreon members, and occasionally still post publicly, so I don't disappear completely, but I'm kinda done with this. Using a somewhat private platform will allow for a lot more detail of the "challenges" of day to day management. 

There will be photos and video, and a Youtube channel would be a natural place to deposit older content after Patreon members get it first. There are thoughts that a book might be be derived from this, although it may not be game trade specific. I could imagine ancient culture interspersed with "store on fire" stories. 

Although money will be tight, I'm not doing it for the money. I'm naturally going to write anyway, either for the book or for Patreons. It's what I do. My financial "offset" for this trip is about $1,000 a month, meaning that's what it costs me to maintain my life back home AND travel. I'm not going to get that in subscriber fees, but it would be nice to offset costs while creating content. It would be even better to use subscriber money to do cooler things or buy things like camera gear or a desperately needed new laptop. 

Thanks for reading this far! Please post your thoughts. I'm not one for "begging" for money, and I haven't set anything up at all. I have no experience in the subscriber model, other than what we did with Kickstarter. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments. My Facebook page Owlbear Adventures documents some of the technical elements of the trip since April of last year. We leave the first half of 2023.