Important Updates - ADHD & Charge-upfront pledges (Patreon)

Hello everyone.

ADHD

A somewhat difficult post to write. Last week I was diagnosed officially at the age of 32 with inattentive ADHD. This has been impacting my ability to perform open ended problem solving, perform executive function and sustain concentration and focus throughout my entire life, without my knowledge. It explains an enormous amount about my childhood, school + higher education, and professional career. 

Without wanting to get too much into how personally affecting this revelation is, and all of the emotion and processing that comes with it, I'm telling you all because it is relevant to my output, and has been since well, forever. Those of you paying attention will note that my work appears to arrive in creative bursts, where I create a ton of high quality content in a seemingly short space of time, and other times seem to take an extremely long time to get seemingly simple things done. Despite beating myself up for years about my failure to produce when I know I needed to, and constantly fighting to understand the root causes (lack of sleep? needing time off? feeling burned out? needing a change of direction? just lazy? no longer "enjoying" work?), while many of those things have played varying parts, I'm now able to isolate the single biggest cause, allowing me to start to work with my brain rather than against it. As a result I've never felt better. I'm going to be starting medication soon and there might be a bit of a journey involved in finding the correct medication/dose/routine for me, and I wanted to explain some of the volatility behind my work now that I finally have an explanation beyond my own shame and perceived failure.

There's a lot more that goes into this and its affects on my home life, relationships, etc but suffice to say that since going on the journey that lead to my diagnosis every aspect of my life has been improving dramatically. I just want to ask for a bit more of your seemingly bottomless patience while I navigate this new understanding of my brain.

Charge-upfront pledges

I'm going to be moving my Patreon to Charge-upfront Pledges soon. What this means is new patrons will be charged immediately on their first pledge, and then at the start of every month going forwards. It also means if you upgrade your pledge, you will be charged the difference immediately.

The main reasons I am changing this are:

• I want to be able to provide the 1:1 help associated with my highest tier immediately, rather than telling patrons to wait a full month before I can help them.
• I want to avoid confusion where patrons wonder why they are not in the credits for new videos after pledging, etc. With charge up front I could know to update the credits list for every new video and it would be easier to filter the downloaded data from patreon.
• I have many resources, itch.io source code, etc that can be accessed immediately on pledging, and while I have run an honor system until now I want to close the loophole. I am unfortunately not really able to tell if many people have been exploiting this (I don't review all of my patreon/itch records closely enough) but I have certainly seen it happen in the past.

It does create an awkward space of time towards the end of a month where you could argue a new patron will be "double charged". I don't really like this and if I had the tools to do so I would grant new patrons the rest of whatever month they joined *plus* the following month. Sadly that's not an option provided to me.

Mostly though, this just makes things easier for me in terms of providing rewards/resources to patrons quickly when they decide to support my work.

If you were considering upgrading your pledge it stands to reason that it is worth doing so now prior to this change while the old system is still in effect. As afterwards, upgrading will charge you the difference for the rest of that month. As I'm aware this is towards the bottom of an already long post I will post further reminders about this. I am currently planning to change the system on the 28th of this month. My hope being that there is a minimum of time where anyone looking to upgrade can be caught out and end up having to pay more for less time, etc.

It's possible however I am missing something and you have concerns about this new charging method or how it works, if you do let me know below and we can talk about it. I am not averse to changing my mind if this would affect a lot of you very negatively in a way I haven't foreseen.

I was going to write some more stuff but that's probably enough important information for now ^^;

Thank you all again for your support of my work.

-S