13 October 2023

A recent update to WordPress did not interact well with my theme and the result is a complete breakdown of the Pym’s Pen website. I will rebuild it in 2024, but writing always takes precedent. As the next book takes shape, I hope to have a brand-new website to feature its progress. Expect excited over-sharing…

30 June 2022

Well here we are again. After my sheepish posting about being listed as a finalist for the IAN Book of the Year Awards (Novella category), I got another jaw-dropping email today. This one from Foreword Reviews. The Serpent and the Swan, my wee fairy tale novella, won the Silver Medal Book of the Year Award…

15 November 2021

I got an interesting email on Saturday night. My husband and I had just gotten back from a jaunt down to Kerry for a belated anniversary hike (Kells Bay Gardens and Valentia Island are highly recommended) and we were settling onto the sofa for a night of Final Fantasy XIV. I took a quick glance…

11 February 2020

Myth conservation and video game design combine in this rollicking romp of dry academia! A sizzling 200 pages of virtual heritage, game narrative, and culture. Buy yours today! Game Design Meets Conservation It’s out! Released into the wild! My magnum opus (so far)! The culmination of the last seven years of grad school and dissertation…

21 December 2019

Oh Divine Bullshiticus, Patron God of Grad Students, Lend Me Thy Bovine Effluence… It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of a finished dissertation is in want of a Viva. That Defense took place on the Second day of November, the year 2019, on a sunny afternoon in Southern California. The…

9 September 2019

I’m pretty sure it’s not normal to start salivating when faced with stationery. Pretty sure. I know we stationery people are weird, but not that weird. Maybe it’s because I have swapped ring doughnuts for ring binders, I don’t know. Half of pleasure is anticipation. And a large part of anticipation is potential. The “what if.” I look around at the notepads and the leather-bound journals and the accordion files and imagine them filled with potential.

29 August 2019

It’s Not Pretty This is not going to be a pep talk or have a quick fix bullet list in how to get better. This is the grim reality of the feeling of hopelessness many of us face when we finally finish. Today I want to talk about transitioning from PhD to normal life. Because…

19 July 2019

“You’re a F*cking Failure” A year into grad school I realized that academic writing killed my ability to do fiction writing, and vice versa. So I had to make a choice. That was over five years ago. A month and a half ago I finished the culmination of my Masters/PhD and sent it off to…