pHil Rittenhouse
pHil Rittenhouse’s creative journey has meandered from art to science to technology. Roughly in that order, and sometimes all at once. Once upon a time, pHil was a cartoonist. Of course, he also spent over a decade as a research chemist, so that probably cancels out any credibility he may have gained from cartooning.
As a chemist, he learned to approach the world through experiment and observation—habits that shaped his attention to detail as a storyteller. He also learned that explosions, while educational, are frowned upon in most laboratory settings.
These days, pHil (he insists on capitalizing his name that way for obscure reasons no one fully understands) works in software development at Microsoft, where logic and architecture meet imagination, and where he’s spent nearly two decades wrangling SharePoint and Dynamics 365 into submission. The precision of coding and the chaos of creativity somehow coexist comfortably there, which might explain both his career longevity and his fiction.
A lifelong reader with a fondness for history, philosophy, and frequent esoteric rabbit holes, Rittenhouse draws from ancient texts, scientific theory, and forgotten myths to craft stories that blur the boundary between the known and the unknowable.
His writing explores how obligation, guilt, and grace echo across time. Sometimes with explosions, but fewer than he’d probably like.
He lives in rural Illinois with his wife, four amazing kids, and a cast of household pets large enough to qualify as a small ecosystem. When not writing or debugging, he can often be found reading late into the night or volunteering at his church—still experimenting, still observing, and still sketching his next idea in the margins.