Miranda Reeder writes and draws visual novels (kind of like graphic novels, except you play them on the computer) under the name Minyan and the label Harlevin, where she has over 1,400 followers on Itch.io. Her VNs include Arena Circus, The Pretenders Guild, Mnemonic Devices, and Lilith Hall, and her current project with Fablesoft Studios, Twisted: A Dark Fairytale, raised over $2,300 on Kickstarter in October 2019.
I first met Miranda in Toyama, Japan, where she spent three years in the JET program teaching English. After leaving Japan she returned to Ohio to pursue a master’s in Japanese translation at Kent State University, and over winter break we talked via Skype about staying motivated, balancing creativity with Day Job work, and sharing her passion with her family.
I. People Were Really Supportive
But I Also Have a Day Job: How did you get interested in visual novels? I admit I only had a vague idea of what they were until you showed me your stuff.
Miranda Reeder: It started back in middle school when I stumbled upon Lemmasoft forums, which is the forum website made by the creator of Ren’Py, a free platform for making visual novels. I thought it was really cool because I liked to draw and I liked to write, so this was like combining the two, and maybe this could be something I could do. But I didn’t actually get into making them myself until college because you need to be able to do digital art. In middle school I was just drawing on paper and then scanning it into my computer, so I didn’t know anything about programming…
BIAHADJ: Nobody expects you to be a digital art expert in middle school!
MR: But it was frustrating for me at the time because I kept thinking, How do people do this? I can’t figure this out! [laughs] Then in college I took some programming classes for my graphic design major and they reminded me of Ren’Py, and I thought I could try to get back into it. I started my first project and never finished it—I made a bunch of projects that I never finished, and then I decided to do a demo for a visual novel for my senior culminating experience.
BIAHADJ: Is that one of the VNs on Harlevin?
MR: No. [laughs] This one was also never finished! The idea was about fairy tales and fables at war, so the characters were Cinderella and Prince Charming and the Beast from Beauty and the Beast fighting against the Fox from Aesop’s Fables and that kind of thing, but the story wasn’t really fleshed out, so after I did the demo for my senior culminating experience I decided to put it on the backburner and focus on things that had a little more promise.
BIAHADJ: What does that mean, “Things that had a little more promise?”
MR: At the same time I started working on Arena Circus, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do for it, so I kind of put all my focus into making it. It’s like, what, seven or eight years in the making now, and I’m almost done with chapter four.
BIAHADJ: What was it like transitioning from working on a senior project to working entirely on your own?
MR: It was…difficult. The expectations in college were low because no one knew what a visual novel was, so they had no idea what I was basing this on and they just thought it was cool regardless of what I did. But when I’m making a project on Lemmasoft or Itch.io it goes into a community of people who are very familiar with visual novels and what they’re supposed to look like and what’s good and bad in the genre, so it made me more detail-oriented.
BIAHADJ: How did having people there to evaluate you help you grow as an artist, or as a writer?
MR: In the beginning when I was younger it was really nice because you could post your project on Lemmasoft and within like, a day, people would be commenting. Even if you just had some pictures of the characters people would be like, These look really cool, what are their personalities like? And I respond really well to positive feedback…
BIAHADJ: [laughs] You make it sound like you’re alone in that regard!
MR: [laughs] It was the first time I’d ever done something creative and people actually thought about it and seemed to care. When I was growing up I’d sketch and show my friends this picture that I’d worked for hours on, and they were like, Oh it’s really good, and I would be like, Really good? What else??? What about the color composition? What about whatever? They weren’t artists, so they couldn’t give me the kind of critiques I wanted.
BIAHADJ: I’ve had similar experiences showing my work to people, and while they were positive and uplifting, they didn’t feel constructive in any way.
MR: Having your work looked at by someone in your same field feels better because you know for sure this is someone who’s doing exactly what you’re doing and they think you’re on the right track, or they think you should change something and you can trust their judgement because they’re doing exactly what you are.
BIAHADJ: It’s really good that kind of community exists. I feel like there are other communities out there where people are too busy or aren’t willing to give those kinds of detailed responses, which is, frankly, a shame.
MR: Yeah, it really is! I used to see people on Lemma all the time, really young teenagers making their first visual novels, and people were really supportive, and then they grew up into really popular creators. I’m not old, but I feel so old!
BIAHADJ: [laughs]: You’re younger than me, so you’re not allowed to call yourself old!
MR: I have a friend now, I think she’s twenty-one, and she said to me, Miranda, I remember when I played the first download of Arena Circus, I was thirteen years old, and I was like, OH MY GOD!
Character customization screen from Mnemonic Devices.
II. It Felt Like I Didn’t Deserve to Be Paid
BIAHADJ: Why has Arena Circus been taking so long?
MR: Arena Circus is a very ambitious project—when I first started it was originally going to be this RPG where you could have different weapons and battle and have different items you could use in the battles. The problem was that at the time I had no idea how to program that sort of thing—I just assumed I could do it. I was like, Yeah, whatever, I’ll learn how to program this super-complicated RPG, I’m nineteen, I can do anything! Turns out I could not [laughs] so I took a couple of months trying to figure it out and couldn’t, and then I kind of scaled back and thought about what I could do right now.
A little after that I thought, You know, I don’t have to do this by myself, because a lot of people on Lemma will ask around to make groups, and they’ll work on projects together, even free ones. So I put a group together and it was about six or seven people. I had editors, I had writers, background artists, all that kind of stuff, and they helped me get some kinks out of the outline. Things were going well, but then it just kind of fell apart, because obviously it’s a free project so people are going to focus on other things.
In the end when it was just me and one of my friends left I decided I was just going to try it on my own. The reason it’s taking so long is because I’m drawing all the characters and all the backgrounds and making music and writing the story and programming it and testing it by myself, and it’s a really long story. It was disappointing, but I’m kind of a pessimist, so I kind of expected it to fall apart anyway [laughs], so when it did fall apart it kind of reaffirmed that this is something I have to do by myself.
BIAHADJ: That’s…bigger than any project I’ve ever worked on.
MR: There’s just a lot. I get burned out when I work on it for too long, so I’ll do one chapter, then take a break and work on another project. I took a break to work on Game Jam, which is when you make a visual novel in one month. I’m working on putting in voices for a different project right now, so I’ll probably go back to AC in January.
BIAHADJ: That sounds like a perfect workflow because when you get burned out, instead of doing nothing or watching a lot of Netflix, you can start a new project where you’re still able to be creative and produce something.
MR: Working on new stuff always gets me excited. Don’t get me wrong, I do have days or weeks where I can’t work on anything and I’ll just play video games or something, but ever since I started Patreon especially, having my own little community of people cheering me on has really motivated me to keep going during those times.
I also decided that since I have Patreon now I wanted to start commissioning things that aren’t my strong suit—like, I can draw backgrounds in a pinch, but I’m not a background artist, so once I finish Arena Circus the full free game I want to re-release the Golden version with backgrounds and music that I’ve commissioned.
BIAHADJ: Was Arena Circus Golden the first time you actually gave people the option for people to pay for the game?
MR: It was my first monetary VN project, yeah, and it kind of—I felt so bad. I don’t know how old I was, but I was at an age where I was like, Oh man, I can’t ask for MONEY from people, so it was really awkward, and every time someone actually bought it, I was just, shocked [laughs] but now it doesn’t feel like anything.
BIAHADJ: Did people start buying right away, or did it take a while?
MR: I think in the first weeks a couple of people bought it. At the time I had this deal going where I released the first chapter of Arena Circus, and I released the Golden version and that was a dollar, and then I released Chapter 2 and it was three dollars and Chapter 3 was five dollars, but if you paid that much, when future chapters came out you’d get those for free. So I think people at that point had already been playing the game, so a lot of the people who had already played up to that point bought it right away. Nowadays, maybe every week or so I’ll get one purchase.
BIAHADJ: When you were first started to bring in money, was it difficult to balance how much you were keeping for yourself and how much you were using to pay people to do the backgrounds or voices or music?
MR: Not at all in the beginning, because in the beginning I was doing everything so I didn’t have to pay anybody. Now I have Patreon and I have a paycheck, so it doesn’t worry me either. Right now I have a composer I’m paying, so I’ll just ask for one song a month, because I get paid from Patreon once a month, and after I get paid from Patreon I’ll pay the composer. At this point the project can pay for itself, and I kind of waited until I got to that point before I asked other people to come on board so I didn’t have to worry what I was keeping and what I was putting back into it. Everything I get from Patreon right now is going right back to the game.
BIAHADJ: On Patreon or Kickstarter I’m always seeing creators who list budget items along with their own salaries, which is important because if you’re working hard on a project and people are buying it, it makes sense that you can earn money from it too, especially if that money will help pay your bills while you make more projects like it.
MR: I love supporting the creators. I’m at a point where I’m OK not really making money because I’m slowly moving my way up to something more sustainable.
BIAHADJ: What was it like moving from just Arena Circus Golden to Patreon?
MR: It was a difficult transition for me emotionally just because I felt so bad asking people to pay me monthly. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: Don’t feel bad! I think especially now it’s become more accepted because there’s so many different avenues for people to pay creators, and people want to support projects that they believe in and enjoy.
MR: I don’t know…it just felt like, oh, people are paying me for this but it’s only a hobby and I enjoy doing it, so it felt like I didn’t deserve to be paid. I’ve since mellowed out, especially now that I’m putting money back into the projects, so it feels a lot better.
BIAHADJ: I think a lot of creative people feel that way, especially when they’re first making that transition, because it does feel bad to ask for money and market yourself, or feel like you’re selling your work the same way you’d sell, I don’t know, hand lotion door to door or something.
MR: Yeah, basically—Avon salesman!
BIAHADJ: How about Twisted, was that your first Kickstarter project?
MR: That was our first Kickstarter, and that was also nervewracking, but it went a lot better than I was expecting. We actually got every tier but the last one funded, so that gave us a lot more work to do [laughs] but it’ll be worth it.
BIAHADJ: I thought you had a very good reward structure for the different tiers, between the wallpapers and the keychains and the art book.
MR: Yes, we definitely looked at a lot of other Kickstarters and read a lot of blog posts and articles about what kind of tiers we could offer, and we thought really hard. A lot of VNs will offer a lot of art rewards, and since I was doing sprites and basically all of the art for the game, it would have been very difficult to have a lot of art rewards while at the same time finishing the game, so we knew we wanted to have something that would let people have some extra art, but also give me time to finish things so we could ship the rewards with the game, so we decided to just do wallpapers for the extra art assets. The art book is basically sketches and previous iterations of the characters, and then some conversations between Leah [my co-creator at Fablesoft] and I, so there wasn’t a lot of extra work that I needed to do.
Lucy and Santana from Arena Circus.
III. I Found It Really Helpful to Make a Schedule
BIAHADJ: You talked before about having bad days or bad weeks when you can’t do the work or you can’t be creative, and I think we’ve all been there. Can you talk a little more about that?
MR: Yeah…I’m very work-oriented, so I’m at my happiest when I’m working on a bunch of things at once, like I have to draw sprites for this, and I have to write for this, and blah blah blah, and that makes me really happy. So when I don’t feel motivated to do anything like that and I just kind of watch TV or play video games, there’s always this kind of monster inside of me that’s like [evil voice] You should be working, what are you doing, you can’t have fun, you’re not supposed to be playing games right now! So I’m never really enjoying the things that I decided I need to do to take a break. It’s difficult for me to shake myself out of those times, and usually I succeed by [laughs] starting something new.
BIAHADJ: Oh no!
MR: And then I get the issue of having too many things on my plate. But sometimes it works. The Pretenders Guild was something I started because I was just so burned out on Arena Circus, so when National Novel Writing Month rolled around I was like, you know what, I’ll write a video game in a month, and I’ll spend one month focusing on this one thing, and that’s what my brain needs to take a break. And it worked. It actually took me five months all together, but when the month was up it felt like I hadn’t worked on AC in a while, so I had the power I needed to get back to it.
BIAHADJ: I think being able to overcome burnout with a new project is amazing.
MR: It can be really helpful. I always make sure it’s something with a very small scale, because usually the reason I get burned out is because I haven’t finished anything, so letting myself work on something that’s really small or easy lets me have, like, a win, and then once I have that win I feel like I can get back to what I should be doing [laughs] because I’m a winner and I can do this!
BIAHADJ: What has it been like balancing your creative work with graduate school?
MR: That has been…really difficult [laughs]. I thought it was hard when I was on JET and had a job, but graduate school has been difficult because of the homework. I come home and I’m not actually finished with school. I usually work best at night, so to have classes at night and then come back and not really have time for a lot of things has been stressful. I found it really helpful to make a schedule, like I have this class I really hate on Tuesdays, and it doesn’t end until 7, so on Tuesdays I’m always just so burned out that I told myself OK, you don’t have to do anything on Tuesdays no matter what, and then on Fridays you work on Arena Circus and then on Saturdays you do this, this, and this. If I have that kind of set schedule it helps me make sure everything’s done when it’s supposed to be done.
BIAHADJ: Does the schedule also help you use your worktime more efficiently?
MR: For sure, because with the set schedule it’s like, if I don’t get this done now, then I might not have time next week, so everything is like kanarazu, uh, kanarazu…English! [laughs] Everything is definitely done when it needs to be done, if everything goes well.
BIAHADJ: You said that you work best at night, so has it been rough not having your nights free the way you’d like to?
MR: Now I’ve gotten a little used to it. It takes me like a week or two weeks to get into kind of a rhythm, and once I do I’m OK. This semester I actually teach in the afternoons instead of the mornings, so I don’t actually have to get up until 10 or 10:30, which means I can stay up later working on Arena Circus or something until like, 2 AM, then I can go to bed and still get eight hours of sleep.
BIAHADJ: What was your creative work schedule like when you were in Japan teaching on JET?
MR: On JET I would come home at 4, and I gave myself an hour to relax—I’d play a game or take a nap or whatever. And then I’d work on creative stuff until bedtime, basically. A lot of the time if I’m drawing I’ll multitask, like I’ll watch a movie or talk to a friend while I draw, so it doesn’t feel like I’m doing nothing but work. And then I had tennis on Tuesdays, so Tuesdays were my days when I didn’t do anything for creative stuff, I just chilled and went to tennis. And then weekends it was a fifty-fifty chance whether I’d be doing creative stuff or going to karaoke or whatever.
BIAHADJ: You were on JET for three years, and that’s a long time—was it easy to keep up that pace, or did you find yourself getting burned out?
MR: I did get a little burned out, but I don’t think it was because of the creative stuff. JET was a little stressful for me in the beginning, partly just because I’m pretty shy and it’s hard for me to adjust to new places and new situations and new people, but once I settled in and got used to waking up at like 7 or 7:30 every day [laughs] it wasn’t so bad.
BIAHADJ: I think when you first get to Japan, and JET specifically, it’s a rough experience. It was rough for me and this was my second time working in Japan. So much is expected of you here in terms of adjusting to the all-Japanese work environment, both language-wise and culture-wise. ALTs [Assistant Language Teachers] also aren’t given a lot of specific training on how to be teachers, and then you’re really on your own for so much of the day, and that can be really disorienting and scary. I found that during my first few months it was very difficult to focus on creative work because the challenges of school and daily life were so overwhelming that when I came home at 4, I couldn’t salvage my time the way I wanted to because my mental capacities weren’t free—they were worried about some problem or a terrible class I had to teach.
MR: [laughs] Yes, I definitely had those days—and those classes.
BIAHADJ: Did you have any similar problems?
MR: I feel like when I’m stressed like that, coming back and doing something creative helps me unwind. I couldn’t have come home and worked on Arena Circus, but coming home and just sketching whatever I wanted to, that really helped, and that’s something that I actually don’t get to do often when I’m in a regular motivated schedule. I don’t get to draw just for fun anymore, so if I’m really feeling burnt out sometimes I’ll just doodle and that helps me calm down.
BIAHADJ: Which was more conducive to getting your creative work done, being on JET or being in grad school?
MR: [long pause] That’s a hard question. Probably being on JET, because I had more free time, and in grad school I’m constantly worrying about the next step. On JET I never worried about what I was going to do afterward because I was going to be there for another year or two, so I didn’t have to worry about the future! But now I think about having to find a job and moving out and all that kind of stuff, so it’s just little stressful things in the back of my mind.
BIAHADJ: Those are very real concerns, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t worry about them too. It feels a million times better to have things settled at least for a year or some set amount of time.
Game screen from The Pretenders Guild.
IV. I Almost Never Post Anything on Facebook
BIAHADJ: You also spent last summer working for a game company in Osaka, so what was it like working in a very Japanese office environment?
MR: It was nice overall, and I really enjoyed it. I got to do a lot of work that I liked, and they did tap into a lot of my other skills besides translation. But there’s not a lot of—like I said, I respond very well to positive feedback [laughs] and there’s not a lot of that. So I never knew if I was doing what they wanted, or if I should do something different, and that made me really anxious. A lot of days I was just freaking out the whole time but smiling and nodding at what they said anyway.
BIAHADJ: Did you find yourself taking that stress home with you?
MR: Oh yes.
BIAHADJ: With jobs like JET or the Osaka company, did you find yourself doing them as just a Day Job to pay bills, or were you more passionate about them?
MR: Definitely paying the bills, honestly. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: It’s OK, we’ve all been there.
MR: I think it would be great to have a job that I was really passionate about, like I’d love to do desktop publishing for a localization company, but I’m aware that whatever my Day Job is it’ll probably be something I’m just doing to make money with. Hopefully I enjoy it at least a little bit, but I’m not too concerned about that because I feel like no matter what I’m doing, I can come home and I have this really cool creative quote-unquote “job” that I’m really passionate about.
BIAHADJ: And how about your dream job, what would that be?
MR: My dream job would be translating games from Japanese to English for Nintendo—that’s the job I’ve wanted since I was in middle school. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: And how about your ideal setup as a visual novel creator?
MR: I would like to be…less money-related. I would like to be as well-known as, say, Winter Wolves Games or Hanako Games, where I’m kind of like a name in the VN community and people know that they can play my games and always have a good experience. I don’t really have any hopes for it money-wise—I think if I keep going at the pace I’m at I might make some rainy day money or it could be a supplement to whatever my Day Job is, but more than the money I’d just like to be a creator that people feel like they can rely on and enjoy my work.
BIAHADJ: When you publish under Harlevin or Fablesoft is your name anywhere on the project?
MR: My name isn’t on it. I use a pen name, Minyan, which is three letters from Miranda, MIN, and then, in one of the Pokemon games they ask what you want the suffix to your name to be, and the choices are chan, kun, and yan, and I was like, yan, I’ve never heard of that one, that’s really cute, so I just combined the names. I also found out recently that minyan is a Jewish term for a group of ten men for religious ceremonies, so that’s kind of a weird coincidence.
BIAHADJ: I know some people who prefer to stay anonymous or semi-anonymous online because they want to keep their creative work separate from their professional work, or don’t want to be associated with it for other reasons, which was why I asked.
MR: I think it’s just because I started this when I was really young, and at the time it was really bad to give out your personal information online, so I just stayed anonymous. I’m not deadly against putting Miranda Reeder on something, I’ve just always used a pen name.
BIAHADJ: Is it easy for you to share your work with people who know you in real life?
MR: I think another thing left over from middle school is that a lot of my friends and family just don’t really care about the creative stuff I do, so it never occurred to me to say, Hey guys, I made this thing, play it! because I knew they wouldn’t. As far as if my coworkers ever found out, I think one of the things I do to prevent me being afraid of that is that I usually make games that are very…what’s the word…I don’t make Rated-R games, they’re pretty clean—
BIAHADJ: [laughs] But there’s some sex in them.
MR: [laughs] There is NOT! [aside] Well, wait actually, yeah there was, but it was all very tasteful.
BIAHADJ: Sex can be tasteful! There are plenty of examples of tasteful sex in fiction and comics.
MR: Yes, so I keep everything very tasteful. My boss when I was in Osaka, the CEO of the company, looked at the Pretenders Guild, and while it was a little embarrassing, I knew there wasn’t anything in there so horrible that I wouldn’t want anyone who knows me to read it. If I were to ever make, like, an over-18 Mature game or something, I would definitely do it under a pen name that I would NOT want to be associated with.
BIAHADJ: Why?
MR: That’s a whole other thing—those are some interests that you just don’t want people to know you have. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: Did you show your boss The Pretenders Guild or did he stumble upon it?
MR: He asked me—I told him that I made visual novels and he asked me to show him one, and I felt a little embarrassed, but it was more because he was the head of a company that localizes games, so he’s seen a ton of games, even by indie developers, so the embarrassment was more because of my perception that my art or my writing wasn’t quite at a professional level yet, rather than him finding out that I write about people kissing.
BIAHADJ: How about your family—are they supportive even if they can’t enjoy the games themselves?
MR: When I was growing up and I would draw I would always show my mom, and her response was always, That’s OK, or It’s fine, so that kind of prevented me from showing other people. Nowadays I almost never post anything on Facebook, which is the only medium where my family could possibly see something. But I found that when we did the Kickstarter and I posted it on Facebook, a lot of my family was really supportive and they donated and got the rewards. My uncle called me, actually, and was like, How does this reward thing work? and I told him that if he donated this much then he would get the game, and he was like, I’m not going to play the game, Miranda, just tell me how to donate. [laughs] They mean well, and it’s a medium that’s not for everybody, so I don’t expect them to play and enjoy it, but it was nice seeing that they would support me anyway.
BIAHADJ: Has this encouraged you to be more active on Facebook, as opposed to places where your family and friends wouldn’t necessarily see?
MR: That stems from me just never thinking my family or friends would care about my projects, because so many of the ones I have told just seemed very neutral. I got the feeling that no one would care, so it kind of became a pride thing—like, I can make this popular without the help of my friends or my family, and all these people who are supporting me right now don’t know me at all but they’re supporting me anyway. It felt like if I posted this on Facebook and asked people to join my Patreon or follow my Twitter it was like cheating. I don’t feel that way so much anymore.
BIAHADJ: What caused the change?
MR: I think it was just a gradual thing. When you’re first setting up on Patreon they give you a lot of tips, and one of their first tips is to tell your friends and family and have them support you first, because more people will join if they see that creators are being supported. Reading those articles helped make me see I was being silly, and then when I posted the Kickstarter on Facebook and saw how happy my friends were, that also made me realize there was no reason for me not to share this with the people I actually know in real life.
BIAHADJ: Once you actually started sharing it with the people you knew in real life, did you find people who were willing to play the games and enjoy them?
MR: I had a couple of friends who say they’re going to play but have not yet, so…I’ll get back to you on that. [laughs]
You can check out Miranda’s (a.k.a. Minyan’s) work at her Harlevin page or follow her on Twitter @Minyan.