Articles by mgedwards

Playing Games

Many expats living in places without extensive entertainment options love playing games for fun.  Poker and other card games are especially popular, as well as trivia nights at public places, board game nights hosted at expats’ homes, golf outings, and video game marathons.  They’re fun diversions from the norm, particularly when “fun” activities such as the theater, sporting events, or (jazz/disco) clubs are few and far between.

Game nights are a great way to get together with your friends and colleagues and socialize in a competitive atmosphere.  Still, I’m a contrarian when it comes to competitive game playing.  I would rather channel my competitive energy and enthusiasm into something more financially lucrative.  While I enjoy socializing and joining acquaintances at an occasional get together, I’ve never really had much of an interest in playing games on a recurring basis.  I often prefer to take the money and time I would have spent on the activity and invest or donate it.  I once suggested starting an investment club with someone who enjoyed playing poker.  They liked the idea but opted to put down $40 a night on a chance to rake in $200 or lose it all.  Personally, I would rather spend the four hours and $40 I would have spent gambling and invest it in the stock market.  The odds of success are better, and the returns tend to outperform those of game nights.

Although I do enjoy socializing and occasionally participating in a game night, I usually weigh the cost and benefit and then decide whether I want to spend an evening’s worth of precious time playing games.  Other activities often take priority and have a much higher return.

Choose Your Own Adventure

I spent some time this weekend updating an old Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) book I wrote when I was younger.  Over two decades ago I entered the book manuscript entitled “The Two Sides of Africa” in a CYOA publishing contest.  Although my manuscript wasn’t selected, I received a personalized letter from the publisher, Bantam Books, Inc. letting me know that my story was a serious contender.  After the contest ended, I shelved the manuscript and didn’t touch it again for another two decades.  This weekend I pulled it off the shelf, dusted it off (literally) and started updating it.  It’s a great story that needed some grammar and stylistic updates.

I loved the CYOA series as a kid and bought the first 75 books (I still have them).  Back then, Bantam Books published the books almost monthly for $1.99.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that one of the original CYOA authors, R. A. Montgomery, bought the rights to the series from Bantam in the early 2000’s and revived it.  Montgomery founded a company called Chooseco to publish and market the series.  He also reissued some of his old CYOA books and published a few new ones.  I noticed that the price per book has gone up considerably since the 1980’s – they now cost $6.99 a book.  That’s probably because Chooseco has higher overhead than a mega-publisher like Bantam (now owned by Random House).

CYOA books were the first ones to employ rudimentary hyperlinks, a common feature on today’s web pages, to carry the story.  The books feature several different stories and endings and force the reader to choose between two or three divergent story options as it progresses.  The series spawned several knock-offs and was quite popular in the 1980’s.  It faded as a genre after the Internet took off in the mid-1990’s.  That’s a shame, because the books are tailor made for the Internet.  While Chooseco has helped revived the genre, it’s unlikely that it will make a significant comeback unless they become popular on Amazon’s Kindle or another electronic book reader.

I learned about Chooseco after I started updating my manuscript (now called “Adventures in Africa”).  Although the company states that it does not accept unsolicited manuscripts, I’m planning to contact them after I update the story and tell them about my story.  Perhaps nostalgia will persuade them to take a second look at my manuscript…two decades later.

Happy New Year 2010

I wish you a happy and prosperous 2010.  I hope 2009 treated you well and that the new year will be even better.  What do you have planned for the new year?

I’m one of those people who believe in making and achieving goals, and I consider New Year’s resolutions worthwhile.  Resolutions help one think about what needs to change and how to change it.  Unfortunately, it’s very easy to break resolutions because they usually focus on aspects of our lives that we continually struggle to improve.  Hence, “resolve” is a key aspect of resolutions, and one must have the resolve to achieve the resolutions they make.

I’m as guilty as anyone in making and breaking my resolutions for the new year, so I have made three personal commitments this year that I hope will help me achieve my resolutions for 2010.  One, I chose goals that I am already pursuing and have already made some progress in achieving.  Two, I chose incremental targets for my goals rather than “pie-in-the-sky” aims that I know I will never achieve.  Third, I pledged to prioritize these goals, focus more on achieving them, and balance them with other responsibilities so they’re not superseded by life’s daily demands.  With these three commitments I hope to accomplish these resolutions by year’s end.

Here are my personal goals for 2010:

  1. Make a major life change
  2. Lose weight (10 percent)
  3. Climb Mt. Kilimanjaro
  4. Run (not walk) a 10-kilometer race
  5. Read half the Bible
  6. Stop one bad habit
  7. Write or update 25 short stories
  8. Go golfing three times
  9. Read ten books
  10. Increase our net worth by ten percent

If you haven’t made any New Year’s resolutions, I encourage you to try making some and make the commitment to follow through with them.  If you achieve even one, you increase your chances that you’ll end this year happier than you started it.