Ink & Iron is more than a name, it’s a stance. It’s the refusal to quit, the belief that words can cut as sharp as steel, and the demand that stories carry weight, grit, and truth. This isn’t a publishing house chasing trends or soft edges. It’s a forge for fiction, folklore, field guides, and essays that don’t flinch, that lead from the front, and that leave a mark. Ink is for the story. Iron is for the will behind it. Put together, it’s a challenge, create, endure, and lead by example.
Explore the Silverhand Saga
Myth collides with modern life. Begin with The Silver Hand of Tara.
Fiction
Last of the Púca
The valley keeps its own ledger. Every ribbon tied to thorn, every coin left at a well, every silence held too long is counted. The old people call it courtesy, the young call it superstition, but Aoife knows the balance is real. When surveyors arrive with bright tape and maps that rename the land, when crates are moved in the dark and men laugh too quickly at old warnings, the ridge begins to stir. Drawn into its keeping, Aoife finds herself carrying more than her own voice. The braid at her throat tightens, the ledger hums in her chest, and the parish’s debts press against her skin. Each truth she speaks costs memory, each silence weighs heavier than the last. To endure, she must learn the rules her grandmother whispered: salt for the ford, iron for the sill, truth for the tithe. But the ridge is not the only one counting. A shadow walks with the Crow, a Collector waits in Dublin, and hunger stretches its hand toward the parish. As Samhain nears, Aoife must decide how much of herself she can pay to keep the balance and whether one woman’s steadiness is enough when the land itself demands a keeper. The Last of the Púca is a lyrical tale of folklore and endurance, where myth presses against modern law, and silence speaks louder than any bargain.
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.
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, prologue and through ch 2 so far!
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.
Concept Stage
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.
Concept Stage
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.
Concept Stage
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.
Concept Stage
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.
Concept Stage
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 & I might have a co/author for this one! Stay Tuned
Coloring Books
Birds of Ireland: A Colouring Field Guide
An all-ages colouring journey through Ireland’s birdlife,from robins and goldfinches to storm petrels and choughs. Designed for calm focus, curiosity, and a little everyday wonder.
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.
Concept Stage
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.
Don’t F***ing Quit
A blunt field manual for when motivation dies and the excuses get loud. Built around hard principles kill excuses, walk through pain, show up tired, choose discipline over dopamine this book teaches you to keep moving when every part of you wants to fold.
Break the Wheel
Break the Wheel is about smashing the cycles that trap us, whether they’re toxic habits, inherited failures, or the comfort zones that quietly kill progress. This book strips away excuses and exposes how repetition without reflection keeps people stuck in the same ruts. With raw honesty and field-tested principles, it challenges readers to identify their own “wheel” and provides the tools to shatter it. Part philosophy, part manual, it pushes you to move beyond survival into intentional living, where discipline and clarity replace inertia. If you’re tired of spinning and ready to move forward, this is your blueprint.
Concept Stage
Help! My Computer Is Smarter Than Me
Help! My Computer Is Smarter Than Me is a survival guide for anyone who has ever felt outsmarted by their own devices. Written with humor and plain language, it demystifies the everyday frustrations of technology whether it’s printers refusing to print, Wi-Fi dropping at the worst moment, or files disappearing into digital black holes. Instead of jargon and lectures, the book gives readers simple patterns, checklists, and “digital street smarts” they can rely on when panic strikes. From email headaches and password nightmares to smart gadgets and cloud storage, it shows you how to stay calm, fix problems, and keep your tech working for you. It’s not about turning you into an engineer it’s about giving you the instincts and confidence to survive the chaos. If you’ve ever wanted fewer meltdowns, less panic, and the sweet victory of making your devices behave, this is the book to buy.
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?
Concept Stage
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.
Concept Stage
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.
Read nowCode. 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
AI is making people dumber: The Good, the Bad, the Quietly Catastrophic
Generative AI promises instant answers but erodes the cognitive effort at the heart of learning. Drawing on psychological research and 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.
Read nowIgnorance 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.
Read nowReturn 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 RTO is a cultural counterattack from executives clinging to relevance.
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.
Read nowIn tech, when things get tight, culture dies first
When pressure rose, companies prioritised stock performance, normalised burnout, rolled back remote work for control, and quietly cut DEI. Trust is the new currency—and nostalgia is expensive.
Remote Work & Creativity
How remote work reshapes creativity and productivity, drawing from life in Kenmare and observations of the global tech industry.
Available for publishing
Videos
Ink & Iron — Creative Spaces
Everyone has their space, that helps them "Think" or clears their mind, whatever you prefer. We decided to share ours and hope you do the same!
Readings & Excerpts
Selections from published and in-progress work.
About Ink & Iron Authors
Mike Dunn
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 , Old School Professionalism , Invisible Bias , Mentor Without a Title and Help! My Computer is Smarter than me!.
His fiction centers on the Silverhand Saga, where memory, family, prophecy, and choice collide with ancient debts.
Before full-time writing, Michael led global technology teams across insurance, government, logistics, and cloud infrastructure, grounding his essays and research in reliability, security, and culture.
Kenneth Lanewood
Kenneth Lanewood is a technology executive with over two decades of global IT leadership across biotech in San Diego, e-commerce in Seattle, complex infrastructures in the UK, and multi-site operations in Taiwan. He currently serves as Director of IT Operations Engineering at Coupang Taiwan, driving automation, resiliency, and large-scale transformation.
His expertise spans infrastructure, cybersecurity, end-user services, and compliance, with delivery under ITIL, SOX, and ISO 27001. He has cut resolution times, launched alpha pilots, and rolled out programs that saved millions while elevating organizational readiness.
Known for mentorship and team development, Kenneth builds high-performing groups and bridges executive vision with actionable roadmaps that scale across regions and cultures.