Michael J. Smith - Fiction, Risk taking
After military service and a successful career as a scientist, Michael J. Smith
began pursuing his interest in creative writing. An Owl’s Whisper (2011),
set in 1940s Belgium, was his first published novel. Eva Messiaen, a
spirited and seemingly guileless school girl guards a dark secret and is soon
forced to question all the assumptions she previously held in her life. An
Owl’s Whisper builds on themes of guilt, redemption, and the importance of
taking risks. Michael J. Smith's interest in risk-taking, he says, was
born of his R&D experience. He observed that successful innovation is
invariably based on the willingness to take risks and feels that this is true
for life in general. Smith further explores the idea of risk-taking in
his novel Cotton and Silk (2012), a World War II story of an
American naval officer and a mysterious Japanese woman willing to risk everything
to steal the secret behind the Emperor’s military might. In 2015 Smith
published the non-fiction work Thicket of Opportunity in which he
presents instructive exercises to explain what smart risk-taking is and how it
can be used to make good things happen. For more information on this
author go to http://thewhisperingowl.com/.
