The Better Patreon is my private Patreon and creative online home launched with the series of four public posts below on 3–6 April 2025.

The Better Patreon provides to all members a regular stream of short stories, poetry, diverse short writings, full Northern Exposure rewatch posts, special features about all aspects of creativity, early access to all my future works before they’re published or released elsewhere, and a lot more to come.

You can join The Better Patreon here. As well as being my new creative headquarters, The Better Patreon also now serves as my official shopfront, with lower prices than anywhere else and more of the proceeds coming to me. And as described below, with the $9 tier you get my full back catalogue for no additional cost.

All the books in the Shop are 100% in the print replica PDF format, reproducing all the layouts and presentational features of the physical books. (This wasn’t the case with my earliest text-only books for Kindle.) These are the very same files from which the physical copies on Amazon are printed.

Below you can see all the items featured in the Shop. Click or tap on any image to be taken to the page for that item on Patreon, or to visit the full Shop there, the accompanying button or this word will also take you there.

Dear visitor or member,

This private Patreon is my new online creative home and private community. I’m a Finnish writer, composer, filmmaker, visual artist, and podcaster.

There’s so much to share about the upcoming content that it’s necessary to split this soft launch over a number of days, during which I’ll describe everything in more detail over a number of posts.

This post from 3 April 2025 — the official launch date — is just the first step. Being a private Patreon, there will be no public posts after the introductory ones outlining the main features of The Better Patreon.

I underline the private nature of my Patreon because it’s important to understand that I see this as an extension of my home. The Better Patreon is not a public forum.

The two tiers are:

$3 a month: this gives access to all posts of every kind. My full back catalogue of creative works is also available here for prices lower than anywhere else.

$9 a month: access to all posts and my full back catalogue of creative works for no additional cost. This currently includes 10 books (two of them also as large print editions), five albums, and three singles.

The place to access all these works is the Shop page.

I’ll also soon package my short film works — currently 39 in number — as video sets that will then be available in the original, highest, non-compressed quality.

More in the days immediately following, and then regular posts of several different kinds commencing with the week starting 7 April 2025.

As mentioned in the first introductory post, The Better Patreon will offer so much that it would have been impossibly unwieldy to outline everything in a single post.

In this one I explain in more detail how the tiers work and outline the regular features that will follow a weekly 3-day cycle.

The $3 tier gives access to all posts of every kind — and please note that everyone, not only members, can buy all my works so far from the Shop for prices cheaper than anywhere else.

The $9 tier also offers access to all posts but additionally includes all my creative works as downloads for no additional cost.

This is true even if you support me on the higher tier only for a single month: if you want, you can pay that once, download everything, and then either continue on the lower tier or split altogether. For the $9, you’ll have gotten everything I’ve published and released so far. There will never be a better bargain for my works.

The Shop page is already active and running, and there you can download everything.

An important point about the ebooks is that when I first started publishing my own works, my first ebooks were in the reflowable Kindle format, but here on The Better Patreon, every single one of the ebooks is available for the first time as PDFs in the print replica format, which preserves all layout and presentational features of the print books.

For me, the way a book is presented is an important part of the work, so I’m very happy to now have all my books available in this form.

The foundation around which all other content will be built over time is the 3-day weekly cycle at the start of each week.

I decided upon this arrangement because it embodies a principle I’ve come to strongly believe in after decades of considering these issues and based on my own experiences and health struggles: no human being should be required to work for a living more days than they have for rest, recovery, recreation, and enjoying life to full, healthy measure.

More specifically, the 3-day weekly cycle means I’ll be sharing regular posts on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday each week. Some of these involve full serialisations of my existing works, others are new.

Each week starts with two things:

• A short story from my book At Dawn: Early Short Stories.

• A newsletter summarising my progress and activities and everything featured on The Better Patreon during the past week. This is a fully laid out newsletter in PDF format. I’ll share the first one in a future public post, once I’m closer to the end of this introductory week.

As for daily posts, on each of those three weekdays every week, all members get:

• A poem from my first book of poetry, Land of Youth & Beauty: Early Poems.

• A chapter from my book of short writings, Art & Love, Vol. 1 (and one day, from the later volumes).

And each 3-day cycle is crowned by a Northern Exposure rewatch post on Wednesday: I’ll be doing a full rewatch of this wonderful TV series and sharing all the thoughts and reactions that have been forming in my mind and heart through the decades since I first saw some of it back in the early 1990s.

This is far, far from all the content and member perks to come, but let’s continue in another post.

(I’ll be sharing all my working methods and things that have worked best for me in all fields of creativity. Also final project files for various visual, video, and music projects. And members will have early access with all my future creative works. And…)

To sum up the features described in this second introductory post, by joining The Better Patreon on either tier, you’ll be getting each and every week a newsletter, a short story, three poems, three concise non-fiction writings, and a Northern Exposure rewatch post.

All these will be filed into their own collections, so you can easily find and access all previous posts in each category. Every member can also customise their notification settings, so you can either get every update in your email or, if you prefer, check into The Better Patreon at your own convenience and in your own time.

Indeed, another good reason for the 3-day weekly cycle is that it will let everyone follow at their own pace and catch up during the later days of the week.

I hope The Better Patreon can grow over time to become a great place for likeminded souls to share and converse. One of my aims with all this is to enter into a much more interactive and open life of creating. I deeply value all my friends around the world.

Please join in on everything that grabs your interest and share your reactions! The Better Patreon is also a private community, free of all the things that most of us have become tired of elsewhere online.

More in another introductory post. Thank you for reading.

This third introductory post is all about the perks of being a member of The Better Patreon and some quirks of being me, specifically as the host of The Better Patreon, and here you can also see the first issue of the newsletter, officially dated 7 April 2025.

Early Access — Every member on either tier will get, at no additional cost, early and full access to each of my future creative works at least one week before I publish or release elsewhere.

Feedback — The variety of content here will embrace all the different types of my creative works, and therefore The Better Patreon will also be the most central and all-encompassing place for sharing your thoughts and feelings on them.

The regular posts of stories, poetry, short writings, and more, plus special posts I’ll make over time on specific works — all these offer a natural, ready context for comments and reactions, in direct connection with those works themselves, so everyone will also be seeing the exact work being commented on.

Your Preferences Heard — Once I have all the regular features going and at various future points as well, I’ll ask members for what kinds of additional content would be of most interest to them. I’m equally happy talking about and sharing any type of creative content, so it only makes sense to ask and listen to the preferences of my honoured guests.

Ad-Free — This Patreon will be entirely free of ads as well as any kind of pressure or hype. I prefer to only offer and share, not seek to compel anyone to buy or spend more. By becoming a member on either tier, everyone present will already have done a major and meaningful thing to support me, and their very presence helps and gladdens me.

For these reasons, I also chose not to highlight one of the tiers, as Patreon does make possible. I wanted to only share the options without emphasising either one over the other. Plus, one of my main ideas behind the two tiers has been that they allow for different and equally valid ways of following my work, in smaller or bigger doses.

My Work Is Your Work — Maybe the most unusual perk — or does this qualify as a quirk? — is that for each month of supporting me here on the $9 tier, any private individual will have my permission to publish or release any single one of my creative works anywhere they wish, in a single context. Even if it makes money for them.

This means any single short story, any poem, any essay, any piece of music, even any video, and so on. So for example, if you’re publishing an anthology of short horror stories, you might want to include my story called “The Scarecrow” (one of my personal favourites).

All I ask of anyone wishing to take me up on this perk is 1) that the person contacts me and asks for my permission for the specific work privately so that we can have a written agreement and make it formal that way, and so that I can keep records of where my works have appeared, and 2) clear, explicit attribution to me and The Better Patreon.

More specific discussion of this perk will follow in one of the future, private posts.

After these introductory posts, this will be an entirely private Patreon. This is the only way I can guarantee a pleasant environment for everyone.

I considered saying here that I’m not making this a public forum because I wasn’t born yesterday and because I’m not totally insane. Many public forums become headaches to their maintainers sooner or later.

But rather than only making a half-joke about it, I do want to clearly explain one of the major reasons for the private nature of this Patreon.

I have a couple of lifelong health issues, ones that have needed daily consideration since my teens, but on top of these, in early 2024 I was diagnosed with multiple and more acute health problems.

Without going into these in any detail in these introductory posts, more than one of these problems is heart-related and means that, at least for the foreseeable future, I positively need to avoid situations that would raise my stress levels. I can only get better — that word from the title with many meanings — if I stay alive.

All the above is also a big part of why I emphasise the fact that I consider The Better Patreon an extension of my home and studio. When inviting others to our homes, we expect appropriate, considerate behaviour from everyone present. This is also true of The Better Patreon.

If I felt someone was going out of their way to create conflict or otherwise sour the mood, it would be equivalent to deliberately creating a disturbance at someone’s home after having been invited there, maybe for a nice dinner party, as a trusted guest. If that trust were to be broken in such a way, the offending person would need to leave. Without a refund.

I say all this to make sure I can guarantee a truly healthy environment for everyone, myself included. The Better Patreon will be free of all the things most of us are tired of in many online places.

I hope this post has helped shed further light on my wish to make this Patreon not only feature getting better and doing better as a theme but also be a better kind of Patreon, to the extent of my ability to provide that. I wish this experience to be enjoyable to everyone on many levels.

Thank you for reading! One more introductory post left, and then regular posts starting on Monday, 7 April 2025.

The earlier public introductory posts focused especially on the tiers and the regular features that will be posted on The Better Patreon every week over the 3-day cycle from Monday to Wednesday.

This last post in the series, now gathered into the collection Introductory Posts, outlines more specialised content that needs to happen on a freer schedule, since creating these posts will require widely varying amounts of time.

Once I have all the regular features running steadily, I’ll start creating these other types of shares, each to be posted when ready. These are some of them.

Progress Reports — I’ll share my progress on all my creative projects in a way I’ve never done before, documenting their creation and all the steps involved and advances made as I go along.

Right now I’m shifting heavily into screenwriting, and I’ll also be publishing my own screenplays. This is my biggest focus for the future. Early Access, described in the previous post, means members will get to read these first, before anyone else.

Creative Diet Diary — I’ll also keep track of and share everything I’m taking in: the creative and other types of nourishment that help energise my own work, day to day and night to night.

Tools and Methods — I’ll be talking about all my creative tools and working methods — all the things that have worked best for me when creating and that I know can also work for at least some others regardless of what kind of art they seek to create (what kinds of stories, pictures, music, and so on).

I’ll share and explain final project files, for example showing how I staged various pictures layer by layer, edited videos, composed pieces of music, and — of course — wrote things.

One of the first pieces like this will be about a simple method change that suddenly helped me stay focused and moving ahead with my short stories better than ever before.

These discussions will be in clear and specific terms, naming the pieces of software and equipment in my personal creative tool kit, and in such ways that what’s shared can be applied to any type of creation you yourself may wish to make.

Anecdotes and Stories — From time to time, I’ll tell about experiences never yet shared elsewhere but that I feel I have an obligation to tell, not only for myself but also for others. (We all own all our experiences. Everything that has happened to us, we are free to talk about, as long as truth and certain clear personal lines of privacy are respected.)

Practical Considerations — I’ll be documenting my experiences with applying for arts grants and also other areas of managing life and finances as an independent artist with more than one lifelong disability as well as some more acute issues. Also as someone who has lived below the poverty line most of his life, including as we speak.

Surprises — One feature I look forward to as a special treat are small spontaneous shares of single points or elements related to something creative. These will be quick for me to create on a moment’s inspiration and will hopefully add random spice to everyone’s experience.

I feel sure I’ll later think of something important I forgot to mention, so please don’t hesitate in the slightest to ask about anything! One final point I want to state explicitly:

All supporters of The Better Patreon are very welcome to share on social media, blogs, or such any part of the posted content they see as members.

So if you wish to share, for example, any image or a quote or even a full poem, feel free to do so and also know you have my thanks. (Just remember to credit me and The Better Patreon.) Again, as an independent creator with limited practical and physical resources, all forms of support and spreading the word about my works and what I’m seeking to do here mean a lot to me.

Likewise, even if you, the person reading this, don’t wish to become a member yourself, in case you know anyone else who might be interested in receiving short stories, poems, diverse short writings, and more on a regular basis, in digestible and nourishing bites, or alternatively in gaining access to my full back catalogue in one go (for $9), any shares would help me and the life goals I seek to pursue here to my fullest ability.

(And of course there’s the full Northern Exposure rewatch, starting with the first post on Wednesday, 9 April 2025.)

Even if it is just one tiny corner of the Internet, I hope The Better Patreon will offer a place of refuge, sanity, and renewal to everyone who joins. I can only affect this small oasis in this world, but what I can do to make it a nice place to spend time at, I will.

That wraps up these introductory posts. Thank you again for reading. On Monday, 7 April 2025, The Better Patreon gets underway.