The Restless Evolution of Tuomas Ylivire

When I think back to the beginnings of Tuomas’s story, it always starts in the dojo. It was Baguette—his father—who first took him to judo practice. For both of them, this opened a world not just of physical skill, but of mental strategy.

Tuomas discovered very early on that judo was never about brute force. It was about intuition, agility, and the art of being unpredictable—reading your opponent, moving in the direction they least expect, and keeping your balance even as the world tries to knock you sideways.

Tuomas, quick as a thought, understood that real control in any situation comes from unpredictability. He became adept at reading not just the surface of things, but the underlying currents, always seeking the angle nobody else had seen. Even as a boy, he was intellectually alert in a way that often surprised the adults around him.

Too quick to catch

At home, nobody ever called him “Tuomas”—he was always “T”. He moved so swiftly that by the time you called his name, he was already halfway out the door, chasing some new curiosity.

Independent, insatiably curious, T was always a seeker. He was also, from a very young age, a voracious reader. Science fiction and fantasy were his worlds—The Lord of the Rings at seven or eight, Ursula Le Guin soon after, and countless others devoured in a blink. His hero, Trambolini, author of the legendary Exosceletal series, became an early obsession.

Pekka Wall becomes to the picture

And then T discovered something that changed the way he saw books: Pekka Wall, his literary hero, was not only Trambolini’s editor, but also the translator of those books into Finnish. Because Tuomas spoke both English and Finnish fluently, he could compare editions—marvelling at how much an editor and translator could shape a world. This sparked his fascination with the mysterious machinery behind books: how an author’s wild imagination is channelled through an editor’s lens and emerges somehow sharper, clearer, more alive.

There’s a moment I wrote in both Handful and The Birthmark Murders—the day, aged twelve, at the Helsinki Book Fair, when T met Pekka Wall. He even managed to sit on Pekka’s lap for a private conversation, and it marked a turning point. Tuomas realised then that, for all his creativity, his imagination was a sort of beautiful chaos—one he couldn’t wrangle alone. He needed guidance, a mentor, someone to help bring order to his creative storms. And after reading Trambolini’s books, he understood that the person for the job was the editor.

So, at twelve, he asked Pekka Wall if he would edit his first novel. Fast forward eleven years, and they met again, this time in Ryväskylä. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

Gay but OK with it

For Tuomas, sexuality was never the story. His coming out, such as it was, barely made a ripple. His family—parents, grandparents—accepted him without fuss. There were always bigger tempests in his life than sexuality. His real struggle was always with that wild, restless creative energy: how to harness it, how to shape it into something meaningful, how to keep from letting it become just a destructive force.

Meeting Pekka was, in truth, meeting more than a mentor. It was a meeting of minds, of souls—something beyond romance, beyond the physical. It was the kind of love that feels as if two people are working with a shared brain, one thought flowing effortlessly into the next.

Not everyone in the family found this connection easy to make. Hermione, Tuomas’s mother, felt a pang of jealousy towards Pekka Wall—she had never shared that kind of supernatural, wordless understanding with her son. She loved him deeply, of course, but that particular frequency was one she couldn’t quite tune into. And Baguette, his father, would often shrug and say, “I’ve never understood what goes on in that head—but by God, it’s brilliant when it finally emerges.”

So, there you have it. For Tuomas, the driving force has always been the struggle to harness his own wild creativity—to transform the chaos within into something beautiful and lasting, rather than just a hurricane of ideas that sweeps everything before it. That’s the energy that still propels him forward, and the thread that binds his story to those around him.

Cheers