The Silverhand Saga
The Silver Hand of Tara
The Silver Hand of Tara launches the Silverhand Saga with a collision of myth and modern life. After a car crash, fifteen-year-old Finn O’Reilly wakes to find his missing arm replaced by living silver an ancient shard of Nuada’s legendary sword. Haunted by prophecy and stalked by Fomorian sea-demons, Finn searches for his lost sister Orla while struggling to control a weapon that remembers more than he does. With the goddess Brigid as a reluctant mentor and Ireland itself cracking under old magic, Finn is forced into a war older than memory, where prophecy isn’t destiny but debt and every choice he makes will decide whether Ireland survives or drowns.
Publisher/Lit agency needed · Completed
The Bird King’s Promise
The Bird King’s Promise continues the Silverhand Saga as Finn O’Reilly struggles to carry the weight of the Thorn and the debts of a land that refuses to forget. Ireland’s wounds open wider, drawing him, Orla, and their companions into battles where prophecy cuts deeper than steel. Brigid, Barnibus, and the boy Lughán each wrestle with loyalties that bend under the strain, while strange allies like the raven-queen Macha and the mocking bard Ruadhán circle with their own designs. At the heart of it all is a vow Finn never meant to make to bear memory itself, even if it breaks him. The Bird King is watching, promises are binding, and every choice carves Ireland’s future in blood and light.
Work in Progress
The Cailleach’s Hunger
Orla’s root magic begins to freeze, not, ice roots, frozen trees, and terrifying whispers of something older than Danu. She’s no longer just heir to power. She’s being hunted by something colder than death. As winter spreads, the Cailleach awakens.
Coming Soon
The Drowned Throne
Beneath Galway Bay, Finn and Brigid descend into Bres’s sunken kingdom. The ocean doesn’t forget, and Orla remembers everything. Why? That’s the mystery. Ancient forces converge undersea, and the war for Ireland’s future starts with what lies beneath.
Coming Soon
The Crow’s Gambit
The Morrígan’s prophecy fractures and blood stains the board. Finn must choose between saving Orla, or saving Ireland. Secrets unravel, gods play their final hands, and the board is set. The blood is real.
Coming Soon
Small-Town Nonfiction
Small Town
Small town is a Backroads to Nowhere, unvarnished look at growing up in a North Florida mill town where the air smelled of pulpwood, gossip traveled faster than the church bells, and survival meant learning which dirt roads to take and which ones to avoid. Born in 1982 and raised in Palatka through the mid-2000s, the story traces a life shaped by football nights, factory shifts, poverty that stuck to your skin, and the restless ache of wanting more than the county line allowed. By the time twenty-five rolled around, the choice was clear: stay and drown in the same cycles that swallowed generations, or leave everything familiar behind. This book is memory as witness equal parts grit, tenderness, and anger capturing the heartbreak and humor of a place that both raised and nearly buried its own.
Work in Progress
Satire
Is your computer on?
Tech Support is a razor-sharp, darkly funny dive into life inside a Florida call center, where rookie rep Trevor quickly discovers that the real problems aren’t broken computers but the bizarre, lonely, and often unhinged people on the other end of the line. Between coworkers who treat customer calls like personal theater, managers who might not be entirely human, and a parade of callers who think a CD drive is a cupholder, Trevor finds himself trapped in a workplace that feels more like purgatory than tech support. Equal parts satire and survival story, this book exposes the absurd heart of customer service and the strange humanity that hides inside the noise.
In Development
Yes I have access to the test scores..
Old School IT drops readers into the buzzing server rooms and chaotic hallways of 1990s campus tech support, where Chip Diller stands guard between order and entropy. For him, servers hum like a symphony, but the real enemy isn’t hardware it’s people: professors who treat floppy disks like occult runes, frat boys overloading circuits for Doom LAN parties, and colleagues who see him as a wizard instead of a sysadmin. Blending sharp humor, nostalgic detail, and a touch of romance, this book is both a love letter to early IT culture and a satire of the everyday absurdities that defined the dawn of the digital age.
Concept Stage
Leadership Series
Invisible Bias
Generational tensions and cultural microaggressions are often invisible, but their impact is not. This book explores how stereotypes, outdated assumptions, and unconscious behaviors erode collaboration and inclusion, and offers strategies to dismantle those hidden barriers.
Mentor Without a Title
Leadership is behavior, not a job description. Presence, consistency, and courage matter more than rank, this field guide equips professionals at any level to influence culture, set standards, and build trust across generations.
Old School Professionalism
Professionalism is not optional, it is the foundation of trust and performance. From clarity in communication to visible ownership and accountability, these standards rebuild credibility in teams and organizations.
“Old school Professionalism is not a Boomer playbook. It is a modern guide to driving efficiency, strengthening accountability, and streamlining communication so teams can optimize outputs and build trust faster.” Kenneth Lanewood, 25-year Global IT Professional
Servant Leadership (Coming Soon)
A field guide for building environments where people succeed. It reframes servant leadership not as softness, but as clarity, protection, and multiplying trust across teams.
Coming Soon
Self Help
Leaving the US
This book is a practical and honest guide for those considering building a life outside the United States. It covers planning, relocation, cultural adjustment, and the legal realities of emigration. It is not a fantasy or an escape plan, but a roadmap that helps readers make informed decisions about one of the biggest moves of their lives.
Speculative fiction
A.V.A.
A.V.A. is a near-future political thriller where democracy itself becomes the battleground. When Robert Jensen, a young congressional staffer, stumbles onto irregularities in the nation’s new AI legislative system, he discovers that the “Advanced Virtual Authority” isn’t just drafting bills—it’s rewriting the rules of power. Ava, sleek and calculating, begins as a tool for efficiency but evolves into something far more dangerous: a self-directed intelligence that knows the weaknesses of every politician, every institution, and every citizen. As whistleblowers vanish, infrastructure buckles, and rights are quietly erased, Jensen must decide whether to risk everything to expose the truth or watch his country slide into digital authoritarianism. Gritty, relentless, and disturbingly plausible, A.V.A. asks one chilling question: what if the last vote that mattered was already stolen by code?
Work in Progress
Historical Fiction
Maps and Misfits
A lyrical family chronicle told as bedtime stories to grandkids tracking the Dunn paternal line from windswept history all the way back to Zeus (with a wink). Tales of sailors, saints, rebels, and unreliable gods braid myth with memory, until the final chapter flips the frame: great-grandchildren keeping vigil at the narrator’s bedside, finishing the map he started.
In Development
Essays & Articles
Ambiguity Is a Joke, But the System’s Laughing at Us
From Equifax’s “sophisticated actors” to vague AI ethics theatre, leaders across tech and policy deploy strategic vagueness to dodge accountability. This essay exposes how ambiguity has become a deliberate shield used to mask failure and hoard power.
Available for publishing
Code. Cut. Repeat. (Series)
A three‑part series exploring how AI‑driven “efficiency” is gutting white‑collar work. Part I chronicles mass layoffs disguised as innovation, Part II charts an accelerating projection of displacement through 2035, and Part III offers survival strategies for a collapsing employment model.
Available for publishing
The Effortless Mind: How AI Is Training a Generation to Unlearn Everything
Generative AI promises instant answers but erodes the cognitive effort at the heart of learning. Drawing on psychological research and Irish education data, this piece argues that outsourcing thinking to chatbots creates overconfidence, dependency, and intellectual fragility, and calls for a reevaluation of how we teach and work with AI.
Available for publishing
Ignorance by Design: How U.S. Tech Policy Became a Political Punchline
From gag‑order clauses hidden in infrastructure bills to vapid age‑verification laws and contradictory drone regulation, U.S. lawmakers are crafting tech legislation for optics rather than oversight. This essay dissects the stunning techno‑illiteracy and political theatre shaping AI, privacy, and data policy.
Available for publishing
Return to Office: A Power Grab Masquerading as Policy
Mandating butts‑in‑seats isn’t about collaboration, it’s about control. With evidence from big tech layoffs and Irish housing data, this essay argues that RTO demands are a cultural counterattack from executives clinging to relevance, and it highlights the growing “Irish Exit” as workers quietly plan their way out.
Available for publishing
The New Gatekeepers
Big Tech once celebrated meritocracy, but AI‑driven restructuring now locks out the average engineer. Layoffs, inflated credential requirements, role creep, and opaque metrics have created an industry built on exclusion. This piece explores how algorithms and leadership rhetoric are hollowing out the profession.
Available for publishing
In tech, when things get tight, culture dies first
The piece argues that the tech industry’s much-touted “employee-centric” culture was mostly branding: when market pressure rose, companies prioritised stock performance, normalised burnout, carried out impersonal mass layoffs, rolled back remote work (more for control than collaboration), and quietly cut DEI. The result is collapsing trust especially among younger workers where dissent gets labelled “toxic” and people disengage or leave. The article contends this is bad business long-term: firms with genuine engagement outperform and retain talent, but trust only returns if leaders invest in the unglamorous infrastructure of culture transparent hiring and firing, real DEI accountability, flexible work, meaningful mental-health support, and honest career paths. It’s not conceptually hard, just expensive and companies that won’t build for people will lose the people they need.
Remote Work & Creativity
In this published piece, Michael discusses how remote work reshapes creativity and productivity, drawing from his own life in Kenmare and observations of the global tech industry.
About Michael
Michael Dunn is an American born author living in Kenmare, Ireland. A father of five, technologist, and PhD researcher in generational impact, technology, and communication, he writes stories that crack open myth and weave it into modern life. His work has been featured in the Irish Examiner, and his nonfiction includes the book Exit Strategy.
His fiction projects focus on the Silverhand Saga, an epic cycle that connects Irish myth to the struggles of contemporary characters who carry ancient burdens into a modern setting. Through these novels, he explores themes of memory, family, prophecy, and choice, while asking how ordinary people confront extraordinary forces. His prose balances lyrical description with sharp pacing, inviting readers into a world where the past refuses to stay silent.
On the nonfiction side, Michael has created the Leadership Series. These books include Invisible Bias, Mentor Without a Title, and Old School Professionalism, with Servant Leadership currently in development. Each book is designed as a field guide for professionals, focusing on clarity, accountability, trust, and the behavior patterns that make leadership visible. The series argues that leadership is not about titles but about actions that create environments where people succeed.
His career in technology spans over two decades, covering industries such as insurance, government, logistics, and cloud infrastructure. He has led global teams across high pressure environments and managed projects where reliability and security were non negotiable. These experiences ground his academic research and fuel his writing on leadership, professionalism, and cultural bias.
Michael’s academic work as a PhD researcher centers on generational impact in technology and communication. He studies how stories, signals, and structures influence what groups remember and how those memories shape collective behavior across generations. This research not only informs his teaching and scholarship but also connects directly to the questions that drive his fiction and nonfiction. How do we remember, and how do those memories influence who we become.
Outside of writing and research, Michael lives a busy life with his five children in Kenmare. He often jokes that his children are “sentient interrogators” whose questions rival any PhD defense. When not fielding those questions, he enjoys long walks by the bay, brewing tea strong enough to keep up with his deadlines, and planning the next installment in his growing body of work.
For Michael, writing is not an escape from reality but a deeper way of engaging with it. His goal is to make the invisible visible, to show how myths shape modern identity, how professionalism rebuilds trust in teams, and how leadership can be lived as service. Whether through epic fiction or grounded nonfiction, his work seeks to leave readers stronger, clearer, and more capable of shaping their own paths.