Hello, casual ramblers of a digital dimension! I rarely write blogs like open letters because I find it unnatural, but in this case, there seemed no other way. This Sunday, I’ve made some changes to the different membership tiers at Patreon.

I’ve been pretty irritated with them for a while, but after looking through them on Friday, I couldn’t believe how messy they were, and how hard they were to deliver on some. In short, they did not set up this whole thing I call “the Casual Ramble” for success.

In that way, I had to go back to those essentialism practices I wrote about last September. I had to cut was not working and keep what was. Fortunately that was very easy. I’ve been practicing this for a while now. Moreover, I know I have four things that I want to do with the Casual Ramble and a fifth thing waiting in the wings when we reach a certain threshold of Patreon members.

But more on that fifth thing in a second.

---

---

The four things I want to do regularly are daily blog posts, monthly poetry posts, monthly photography posts and exclusive quarterly short stories. I think the latter three are not just great benefits for a Patreon membership, they are also great exercises for me to keep writing. I try to write at least one blog post per day. I try to write at least two poems per week and I try to make a photography excursion once a month. And I am constantly working on my quarterly short stories in the meantime. Usually weekends.

These are all very doable deliverable things. And now they are divided by tiers. My blogs are free, as are my post archives, but every member of the Casual Ramble Patreon has access to the quarterly short stories; every “Patron with an Outstretched Hand” (Tier 2 members) and “Borboletta” (Tier 3 members) has early access to the monthly Casual Camera posts; and every “Borboletta” has early access to the monthly poetry posts.

Bam. Problem solved.

That said, I may have missed a blog post last Thursday. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I finished a free short story/blog post hybrid yesterday and I hope that it makes up for that lack of blog posts. Just know if I miss a day, it’s not because I forgot, it’s because I am working like a madman on a different project for The Casual Ramble.

My practice of essentialism can sometimes be faulty, but it is still helping me identify what’s not helpful and what to focus on. The promise as always has been to challenge myself and deliver for you. That’s why I refined my Patreon benefits.

Which brings me to the fifth element of the project: Patron exclusive Q&A’s. I can’t help myself, I like it when people ask me questions about anything. I know nothing, but I think a question is a great way to learn something, whether of myself or of the world and I think it would be fun to do as a shakeup of the normal routine. The issue is that it needs a critical mass of people to submit questions.

So I’m setting a goal, I want to have at least 50 patrons by the end of the year. I think it’s doable. That’s just over five new patrons per month and I think there’s a way to make it happen: stickers.

Like Q&A’s, I enjoy stickers. I think they’re just a more effective way to share this project than giving people a link or a web address. I’m also more willing to spend a budget on stickers than making promoted posts on Instagram because… well…

gestures vaguely to the whole of Meta

More than that, I want to give my Patrons a little something special. More than just words. So I went ahead and designed a couple new stickers that you can preview below.

It’s simple: pick a favorite, subscribe to my Patreon, and send in your vote! The poll will be up until Wednesday of next week, so act fast.

---

---