Author: Taryn O'Neill

TARYN is an actress, writer and new media producer originally from Vancouver, Canada. A competitive figure skater for 12 years, she graduated from Duke University. She has appeared on the TV shows ‘Vegas’, ‘Navy N.C.I.S.’, ‘The Inside’ ‘Lie to Me’ and plays a recurring role on the BYUTV family drama ‘Granite Flats’. She has acted in over 20 webseries (winning Best Supporting Actress at the Indie Soap awards for her work on ‘Compulsions’) as well as producing two series (including the Streamy nominated scifi series ‘After Judgment’.) She added writing to her repertoire after starting a blog in 2009, and in 2010, her first comedy script, “The Very True Adventures of the Madoff Girls,” was a Finalist in the NYTVFest FOX Comedy Pilot Contest. She has since written a full length series for ‘Stan Lee’s World of Heroes’ and has numerous web and tv projects in development, scifi being her genre of choice. In her spare time she studies all things science and trains in martial arts. Her quest to be an onscreen badass was first chronicled at her tumblr Operation BABE (Badass Alien-Fighting Body Endeavor), and has evolved into being a blog about being an inspired badass in all areas of life.

“Do you know why you tilt your head that way? … It’s an involuntary reflex in your physiology. It changes the angle at which sound waves hit your eardrum, allowing in more stimuli. Like a lizard. I’ve studied them too. Intriguing characters… their brains have evolved over 320 million years… yet for all their evolution, they form no bonds. Love does not exist for them. They are incapable of dreaming, of contemplating beauty, of knowing something greater than themselves. Not unlike your kind. The experiments we conducted right here in this lab yielded a surprising result: Because, for all your…

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“Screenwriters are asked to make art with business in mind. Why should we feel bad asking execs to do business with art in mind?” @silverwingscrpt And I said that I wouldn’t be blogging much about ‘the biz’ directly… well my brain decided otherwise. The oft contentious marriage of Art and Commerce in Hollywood. The above tweet from Leigh Medeiros, in response to a disconcerting article in the New York Times about using algorithms to revise Hollywood scripts (fodder for another post), had the effect of hurtling me backwards in time, to my junior year at Duke and the study ‘abroad’…

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What an adventure to be blogging within the realm of so many talented and inspiring women! As this is my first official post, written directly for Ms. In The Biz, I wanted to introduce myself: My name is Taryn, I’m a storyteller both in front of and behind the camera, I’ve been in the entertainment industry for over 10 years…. and I’m badass. I include that descriptive because it will be the central spine throughout these posts. But why badass? (Especially as it’s such an overused term of late.) The traditional definition of it reflects a person who is aggressive,…

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As busy, passionate women where our careers are one and the same as our lives, we often refer to the PATH that we are on. We’re on a ‘career path’ or we’re ‘climbing the corporate ladder’. Not to mention the idea of age and the yearly increments of an additional single number. These are very specific images when it comes to our life’s journey: there is a start and an end point with a straight line between. If we can’t move past a certain point along that line, then we conceivably will never get to our end desired point. If…

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