I don’t have much to write about this week, but I am reminded a lot about the importance of consistency. Consistency doesn’t look like much most days. It looks like sitting down at the same desk, doing the next unglamorous thing on the list, and then doing it again the next day. Worth actually saying what that’s looked like lately, rather than leaving it vague.

The hardest part of editing is the first ten minutes. It seems like an eternity to sit there and wait for inspiration. But slowly it comes when I read aloud a sentence, and then I can get into the character’s point of view.

I think the wonderful weather we are having now has a lot to do with it. I can’t ever remember a summer like it. It is boiling at night, and when I walk the dog at 7 am, it is still hot. That isn’t unusual in Ireland. It is remarkable.

But early in a 60-day edit, it can feel boring, and I struggle a little to find consistency in it. Consistency is what I do, though. I show up every morning whether I want to or not. Eventually, the creative juices flow.

That’s the other thing I’m trying to focus on, which is staying in the process. When I get anxious, I usually find I am getting overly concerned about outcomes. There is not much I can do about them. If I focus on what I am doing or trying to do daily, I am calmer in myself. Creativity comes from calmness.

Book 2 of the JJ Haze series, Delivered, is on its second structural edit. That means numbering and naming chapters, tracking word counts chapter by chapter, and making sure the shape of the thing holds before I trust the sentences inside it. Not exciting work to describe. But it’s the actual work, and it’s moving.

It hasn’t all happened alone at a desk, either. Last week I met with a local writer here in Wexford—the conversation reminded me that this process gets easier to sustain when you don’t do it all in isolation. I’ve also joined a writing club and a book club through my local library this year—different rooms, same instinct: staying around people doing the same kind of work or reading the kind of books I want to write.

Regarding Substack, this Autumn I plan to introduce a paid tier. It will be there for those of you who wish to support my writing, and I have other plans there as well. More on that later.

That’s roughly where things stand: a manuscript edit getting steadier one chapter at a time, a local writing life that’s grown busier than I expected, and a plan taking shape for how to fund the next stretch of books. Nothing dramatic. Just the next thing, and then the next one after that. If literary agents are not willing to go with my idea, I won’t be starting from scratch. I will continue to gain momentum to publish or self-publish these books. I set up Substack to build my mailing list and provide some help, if I can, to the subscribers who follow me. If you require any help, please DM me. I always check my messages.

Regards,

Maurice P.

Photo 1 by Markus Winkler on Unsplash, Photo 2 by Andrew Neel on Unsplash, and Photo 3 by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash.

Book 1 of the JJ Haze series, What Remains Unfound, took me almost a year to write the first draft. Book 2, Delivered, took 93 days to write the first draft. Same writer, same script—it’sseries, same commitment to the story — so what actually changed?

Not talent. Not luck. Something slower than either of those: years of figuring out, gradually, how I actually work—and I want to walk through that evolution here, partly for anyone reading this who’s writing their own book and partly for those of you who are simply waiting on reading both manuscripts, because where I am right now with the manuscripts is part of this story too.

Pantser vs. plotter: why I resisted planning my novel

I’ve always been what writers call a “pantser”—someone who writes by the seat of their pants, discovering the story as it comes rather than outlining it in advance as a “plotter” would. For a long time, I believed that was simply who I was as a writer and that becoming a plotter—planning the novel scene by scene before writing it—would flatten the very thing I loved most: watching characters surprise me, finding dialogue I didn’t know was coming, and letting a scene go somewhere I hadn’t planned for it to go.

That belief is partly true. It’s also what kept me stuck for long stretches of Book 1 — months where I knew the story mattered, knew the characters, and still couldn’t find my way to the last page. Not from lack of ideas. From a lack of a way to hold them all at once.

What this actually means for you, if you’re writing: if you’ve got a story you care about and you’re still stuck months or years in, the problem may not be the story. It may just be that instinct alone can carry a scene, but it can’t always carry a full novel draft on its own.

How I learned to write a book plan, slowly

It wasn’t one course or one decision that changed things—it built up over the three years I spent on Book 1, across several courses and false starts, until something finally landed: a paid course built around drafting a full novel in roughly 100 days, at about 1,000 words a day, resting on a book plan written before a single word of the actual draft—the kind of tool a plotter would swear by, and I’d always avoided. That course was one piece of a longer, more expensive education—one I’ll write about properly another time, because the cost of that learning curve is its own story.

What mattered, in the end, wasn’t the course itself. It was the shift it finally allowed: A book plan, done properly, isn’t a scene-by-scene script — it’s not full plotter territory. It’s closer to a map of the territory—where the story starts, where it needs to end, the handful of turns the plot has to make along the way, and who the characters are before the page tests them. It gives 1,000 words a day somewhere to go, rather than 1,000 words spent rediscovering where you left off the day before.

What this actually means for you, if you’re writing, is that you don’t need my exact book plan or anyone else’s branded system. You need some structure—even a page of beats, a rough outline for beginning, middle, and end—before you commit to a daily word count for your novel draft. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to exist.

Editing a novel: where my second draft stands right now

For those of you reading this simply as readers, curious about when Book 2 arrives—here’s an honest look at what “nearly there” actually involves.

I’m currently on the second edit of Delivered—editing a novel manuscript is its own distinct skill from drafting one. This pass isn’t about the scenes yet—that comes later, in its own dedicated edit. Right now, the job is structural: numbering and naming every chapter, tracking the word count chapter by chapter, and going line by line through the whole manuscript to see how it’s actually built, not how I remember building it. As with the draft, I set a daily goal — 3,000 words of editing a day this time, not 1,000 words of new writing. Its purpose is to update the book plan, which will eventually be used when sourcing literary agents or publishers.

That difference in the edits matters, and it surprised me the first time I noticed it. Editing and drafting use different parts of the brain entirely. I can’t switch between them on the same day the way I might hope to—editing in the morning and writing something new in the afternoon simply doesn’t work for me. One is discovery. The other is scrutiny. Asking the same hour of the day to do both rarely goes well.

What this actually means for you, if you’re writing: if you’re editing your own manuscript and finding it exhausting to also try to draft something new alongside it, that’s not a discipline failure. It’s two different kinds of work, asking for two different kinds of attention—plan for that, rather than fight it.

What this actually means for you, if you’re reading: Delivered is real; it’s underway, and this structural pass is one of several deliberate stages before it’s ready—not a delay, but the actual shape of how a book like this gets made.

Pantser and plotter, balanced: planning a novel without losing the magic

Here’s the part I didn’t expect when I first started planning: becoming part plotter didn’t kill the pantser in me. It gave the pantser somewhere safe to play.

I still believe, strongly, that if you plot every single beat and every line of dialogue in advance, the story can end up following a set pattern to its ending without room for anything genuinely alive to happen on the page. That’s a real risk of planning too tightly.

But a loose book plan—enough to know roughly where you’re headed each day—turns out to protect the surprises rather than remove them. I knew where a chapter needed to end. I still didn’t know, most days, exactly how the characters would get there, or what they’d say to each other on the way. The plan held the shape. The pantser still wrote the scenes.

What this actually means for you, if you’re writing: if you’re resisting a book plan because you’re afraid it’ll kill your instinct, you’re not wrong to protect that instinct—you’re just choosing the wrong-sized net. Plot the destination, not the journey. Leave the dialogue, the small discoveries, the surprises, entirely unplanned.

If you’re a writer stuck on a draft or an edit right now, I’d like to know: is it structure you’re missing, or is it the surprise? Reply and tell me where you’re at. I always write back.

And if you’re simply here for JJ Haze — thank you for your patience. Delivered is being built properly, one deliberate stage at a time, and I’ll keep bringing you along as it happens.

Images from Unsplash.com: Photo 1 by Kit (formerly Convertkit), Photo 2 by Jens Lelie Photo 3 by Gintel Gee

This morning I shared an excerpt from What Remains Unfound. Unfortunately, I had to unpublish this. I want to tell you why rather than just quietly moving on.

The closer I get in the agent querying process, the clearer it’s become that the actual manuscript pages need to stay unpublished until the book has a home. That’s not a small print detail—it’s how the querying process protects a book’s future. The problem was that I read the small print too late. So I had to withdraw two articles from my Substack where excerpts were given.

So here’s the shift: instead of manuscript excerpts, what you’ll get from me is everything happening around the book—the character work, the choices behind the plot, querying agents right now, and the parts of writing a crime novel that never make it onto the page. If anything, that’s a better window into the work than a few pages ever were.

When I said I was sharing the journey, I meant it, warts and all. Thanks for being here for this — the story continues, just from a different angle for now.

Delivered — A Quick Update

I’ve now moved into the second draft of Delivered, book two of the JJ Haze series. I’ll spare you the details for now—the shape of it is still settling in my head, and I’ve learned not to talk a book into place before it’s ready. What I can tell you is that the work is underway, and it’s a different writing than book one asked of me.

Reader’s Response to What Remains Unfound

“Couldn’t put this one down. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, it throws in another twist — the characters feel real, and the tension just keeps building.”

— Darren Casey Beta reader

That’s the kind of note that keeps you at the desk on the days the words don’t come easily.

What a Submission Actually Asks of You

Six submissions are out now with literary agents — Jade Kavanagh at Darley Anderson among them — and twelve more are coming in July. Along the way I’ve learned that “sending a query” is really sending five or six different documents, and every agent wants something slightly different from each one.

There’s the query letter itself — your one shot to say who you are and why this book, in a page or less. Then the synopsis, which sounds simple until you realise you’re being asked to compress ninety-three thousand words, five missing girls, and a killer’s unravelling mind into something that fits on a single page without losing what makes the book worth reading. Some agents want the ending revealed in full. Others want the shape of the story without the reveal—which means writing two different synopses of the same book, each one honest, neither one lying by omission.

Then there’s the author bio, the elevator pitch, and the sample pages—and here’s where it gets particular: one agent wants the first three chapters, another wants exactly ten thousand words, and another wants a covering letter structured in four specific parts. None of it is wrong. It’s just not the same test twice.

It reminds me of nothing so much as writing an English composition—except the marking scheme changes for every agent, and you don’t get to see it in advance. You learn the form and answer truthfully and well each time.

The waiting is its own discipline. I’m filling it by building the next twelve forms for July, because a writer who’s still working is a writer who hasn’t handed the reins too much power.

Regards,

Maurice P.

Photo by Towligu Barbhuiya from unsplash.com

I’ve made a change behind the scenes, and I want to walk you through it. The short version first, so you can relax: if you’re here for the writing, you don’t have to do a single thing. You’re already exactly where you should be.

Now the longer version, because some of you may want what’s behind the second door.

What’s changed

For a while now, I’ve been writing about two different things that don’t always sit easily together. One is the writing life—the writing craft, the crime novels, the long road to publication, JJ Haze, and the cases that won’t let him go. The other is something quieter: the work of starting again, of building a life you’ve been putting off.

They’re both me. But they’re not both for everyone, and asking you to read one when you came for the other never felt right. So I’ve split them into two homes under the one roof. Same account, same me — two publications, each doing its own job.

Here’s what each one will give you going forward.

If you’re here for the writing

This — Finding Your Tribe — stays exactly what it’s always been. The writing life as I actually live it: the craft, the doubts, the querying road with all its small humiliations and smaller victories. JJ Haze and the world of What Remains Unfound. The occasional new chapter when one’s ready to be read.

If that’s why you came, you’re home. Stay put. Do nothing. The next piece will land the way they always have.

If you’re working on your own next chapter

The second home is called The Not Done Yet Club, and it’s for the people standing between the life they have and a change they keep postponing. Retirement that’s meant to feel like freedom and somehow doesn’t yet. A goal that’s been “someday” for too long. The next chapter you can feel but haven’t started.

It’s the coaching side of my work—reinvention, mastering your goals, and designing what comes next—written for anyone who suspects they’ve more in them. The tagline says it plainly: the life you keep postponing starts here. And the line I keep coming back to: you are not done yet.

If that’s the door you want open, there’s a button below.

How to choose

Two simple paths:

• Want the writing only? Do nothing. You’re already subscribed to Finding Your Tribe and you’ll stay that way.

• Want to join The Not Done Yet Club? Tap the button below.

The Not Done Yet Club

Helping people write their next chapter. Pull up a chair and let's see what we have in common.

By Maurice

You can be in one or in both. There’s no wrong answer, and nothing breaks either way.

What to expect from here

Finding Your Tribe lands roughly every other Monday—t for the writing life, the road to publication with JJ Haze, and the odd new chapter when one’s ready.

The Not Done Yet Club fills the Mondays in between for anyone working on their own next chapter.

Want something every week? Be in both. Happy with just the writing? You’re already home — do nothing.

I’m aiming for every Monday, with the occasional extra chapter when the work calls for it. Roughly weekly, honestly kept.

Other News

A couple of things from the writing desk, for those of you who like to follow the journey.

I’ve begun Draft 2 of my second JJ Haze novel, working title Delivered. The first draft is down on the page — now comes the real work of shaping it into something worth reading. More on that as it takes form.

And on the querying road: I sent six submissions to literary agents through June, with a further twelve planned across July, Irish publishers among them. It’s a long, patient business and there are no guarantees in it—buton—the it’s moving, and I’ll keep you in it for the highs and the lows both.

However you came to be here, I’m glad you are. Nothing changes for you today unless you want it to. If you’ve a minute, hit reply and tell me which road you’re on — the writing, the next chapter, or both. I read every one.

Maurice P.

Photo by Will Francis - AI & Marketing on unsplash.

With fear as my lifelong companion, what else is there to dread? It sucks all the goodness within you and whispers to you that you are dead.

— from my poetry book - A Flicker of Light, 2015

For the longest time, fear governed my life. Because of fear, I had pulled life back down to the size of a postage stamp — everything neat, calculated, routine. My days arranged themselves around how I felt rather than what I wanted, and I told myself this was order. It wasn’t. I had not overcome the emotion; I had simply learned to live inside it, bound by its invisible limits as surely as a zoo animal is bound by the cage that holds it.

My cage was self-made. For the longest time, I didn’t feel I deserved anything else. It’s why I still visit zoos when I travel — to stand in front of the animals and remember the freedom I have, and to ask myself whether I’m using enough of it.

You may have built a cage too. Most of us have. The bars are usually made of the things we’ve quietly decided we don’t deserve.

This morning I read a post where the writer tried to describe maturity. Here is mine. Maturity is a level of self-awareness where I can be myself and deal with what is happening around me and within me — where I can recognise a feeling and step back from it before it absorbs me.

Fear is an emotion. Most often it works on me through negative self-talk — the voice that says I shouldn’t confront this, shouldn’t bother anyone, shouldn’t give myself permission to want what I want. But not all fear is the same, and learning to tell one kind from another has taken me most of my life. Some fear keeps me alive. Some fear I have had to be overcome. And some I have had to go looking for, just to challenge it. Three stories, one for each.

The cliffs at the back of the island

When I was twenty-one I lived for a year on Inis More part of the Aran Islands, in a cottage on a small farm, with no experience of either. I learned to fish there off the great cliffs at the back of the island — two hundred and fifty feet straight down — for the rock fish that were once the winter staple of the older island generations. I learned to catch them and salt them for the colder winter months.

The how of it was more interesting than the fish, which looked like a giant perch and weighed two or three pounds. It began with a trip to Galway, to an old hardware Store called Naughton’s on Shop Street, where I asked, with a straight face, for three hundred feet of clothesline. The man asked me to repeat the order. I did. He filled it. Then I bought a tin of baked beans, ate them, filled the empty tin with a concrete mix and a bent nail, and left it on the windowsill to harden. A few days later I had my rig: a weighted line, three baited hooks of periwinkle, the clothesline above, lowered the whole way down the cliff to the water far below.

I couldn’t see the fish. I had to learn the water by feel, the clothesline running between my feet as I sat, judging by the pull when to strike — too soon and the bait was untouched, too late and it was gone. It took an age to land the first one. But here is the part that has to do with fear: I am afraid of heights. To fish at all, I had to keep my eyes on the horizon and never look down to where the line disappeared. The fear didn’t leave. I just stopped letting it decide where I looked.

The Glassan Rocks

The other place to fish was the Glassan Rocks, at the far end of Inis Mór where the island narrows toward Inis Meáin. If the cliffs at the back of the island are sheer and high, these are lower — but no less dramatic, full of blowholes where the sea carves through the rock at high tide and throws spray and foam into the air. The best fishing is out on the rocks themselves, and the only way down is to climb the cliff face onto a platform below.

One day I went down with my dog, Croker, a Golden Cocker Spaniel who was my best friend through those years. To keep him safe near other people’s tackle I had got into the habit of clipping him to a leather lead and tying my end to my ankle. That day I was alone, fishing for pollack — a good dinner and a good fight. The water was about ten feet below the platform, and my whole attention was on the fish.

And then the water wasn’t ten feet below. It was twenty, then more. I could read the depth by how little of it was left, and that drew my eyes upward. Everything slowed. I couldn’t see the sky. The wave was already over my head, its crest breaking behind me. When it hit, it gathered Croker and me like a leaf and carried us weightless across the platform to the cliff face. I had dropped the rod. I was soaked in an instant. Then it turned and began to drag us both back out to sea — the dog one way on his lead, me the other. He went over the edge. I reached out, caught his neck with one hand, and with the other found a grip on limestone that tore at my skin. I held on until the sea let go.

I have never gone back down onto those rocks. That fear — of being taken by water that does not care whether I live — has kept me alive in similar moments ever since. It is a fear worth having.

Jumping anyway

In my thirties I started going the other way: looking for fears on purpose, just to step past the edge of my comfort. I am afraid of heights, so I did a charity parachute jump. The cruelty of that one is the waiting — all the time in the world to find a reason not to go. On the training day several people pulled out. I didn’t, and I still don’t fully know why; I was more afraid than all of them put together. But I wanted to see what would happen. I didn’t go for the best out of three. One was plenty.

These days, to heights I have added a healthy wariness of planes — and of leaving them mid-flight. I am not a natural flyer. I am one of those passengers quietly trying to work out how something so heavy stays in the air while I am sitting inside it. But it has never stopped me, and in going anyway I have found the thing that makes the fear worth paying: other cultures, other ways of being human, and a steadily growing sense of my own place among them.

You have your own cliffs. Somewhere in your life there is a fear that has kept you alive — that one is worth listening to. And somewhere else there is a fear wearing the very same coat, one that has only ever kept you small. The work of a lifetime is learning to tell them apart, and then walking back down to the rocks anyway, for the fear that was only ever bluffing.

The quietest cage

For most of my life my writing lived in a drawer. I made characters and kept them to myself, the way you keep anything you are certain will be judged and found wanting. That was the quietest cage of them all — not heights, not deep water, but the fear of being seen and dismissed. My first novel was conceived thirty years ago. It took three years to finally write, and far longer to believe it was allowed out of the drawer. Then a beta reader read the whole of it in ten days. The judgement I had braced against for three decades never came. Someone simply took the work in — hungrily — the way you take in something that is alive.

The poem I opened with says fear whispers that you are dead. For a long time I believed it. I don’t anymore. Fear is still my companion, and will be to the end, but it walks beside me now instead of in front. It is as much a part of me as the writing is. It no longer decides where I go.

Maybe that is all maturity ever was.

Photo by Ali Bakhtiari on Unsplash.com

The Thing No One Here Wants to Name

For most of my working life, my nickname was Low Tech. I earned it honestly. While the office filled up with new computer systems and new screens, I was the man still happiest with a pen and a notebook and a long memory. These days, my stepson can do things with my phone I would never have dreamed of, and my ten-year-old granddaughter is a wizard on it — she has no fear of the thing at all. None of them grew up being afraid of technology. I did.

So I am not the obvious person to be writing this. Which is exactly why I am.

Because there is something sitting in the middle of all our lives now, large as an elephant on our couch, and most of us step around it without saying its name. Artificial intelligence. Everybody knows it is there. Hardly anybody speaks of it plainly. I am not here to frighten you about it, and I am not here to sell it to you. I am here because I think it deserves to be spoken of honestly — and because what it is asking of us is far older than it looks.

Two Men Who Wrote in the Dark

Two writers have shaped how I see the world, and neither of them had it easy.

Viktor Frankl survived years inside the Nazi camps and came out of there with one idea that has never left me: that we cannot always choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we meet it. J.R.R. Tolkien fought in the trenches of the Somme, lost most of the friends of his youth to that war, and then sat down and wrote a green and peaceable little corner of the world he knew the darkness was coming for. Through Gandalf he said the thing as well as it has ever been said — that we do not get to choose the times we are handed, only what we do with the time we are given.

Two men, writing meaning into the teeth of their age. Their backdrop was war. Ours is quieter and far stranger. But the question they answered is landing on our own doorstep again, and it is the same question: what do we do with the time we are given? In their time, WWII was a series of conflicts. Japan had invaded China, Germany invaded Poland and Italy invaded North Africa. It grew and grew as conflict does until it spread across the world. We are not there yet, but nations are attacking other nations as I write and there is an uneasiness in the air.

The Machine Can Write. It Cannot Have Lived.

The first time this became real for me, it was a small thing.

I was working on my novel and I needed to know what phones people carried in a particular year, what cars they drove, the clothes and the shoes they wore — so my characters would ring true to the time they lived in. That is work that would once have cost me days in a library. It came back to me in seconds, and once I double checked, accurately. I sat there genuinely amazed.

But look closely at what happened. It found me the facts. It has no year of its own to remember. It has walked no road, buried no one, carried nothing. It can arrange words about a life. It has never lived one.

That is the whole difference, and it is everything.

The writing instinct was never the trick of putting sentences in a row. A machine can do that now, and do it well. The instinct is the need to take what has happened to you — the grief, the long road, the quiet joy — and make something of it you can hand to another person. That, no machine can take from us, because it has nothing of its own to give.

The Danger Isn’t What You Think

The danger is not that the machine writes instead of us. The danger is that we let it do the wrestling for us.

Because meaning never arrives in the finished sentence. It is made in the struggle to find it — in the staring out the window, the crossing out, the ninth draft. Hand that struggle away and you keep the tidy words but lose the very thing that made them worth writing.

So I have a rule.

It researches for me. It keeps me organised. It slows down kindly enough for me to catch up. I get more done than I ever did, and I am grateful for it. But it does not do the work — it mentors me to do it, and that is the difference.

And on the one road that matters most to me, it never sets a foot. I write my own novels. Every word. The thinking, the choosing, the wrestling — those are mine, and I would not give them away for all the speed in the world. The machine can carry the lantern down a hundred roads for me. There is one road it never walks.

What the Yellow Arrows Taught Me

I have walked the Camino de Santiago several times now on the French Way.

Here is the thing about that walk that took me years to understand. You carry no map. Most days you barely know where you are. All you know is that you are heading West — always West. What you have, instead of a map, are these little yellow arrows. Painted on walls, on stones, on the back of a road sign, sometimes in the middle of nowhere with not a soul in sight. You find one, you follow it until the next one appears, and then the next. That is how you cross a whole country. You never once need the destination. You only ever need the next arrow.

That is exactly the right way to hold this new tool of ours. It is a yellow arrow. It points the way. It does not carry my pack and it does not move my legs. I walk every step myself.

And if you are someone who feels the world has lately started speaking a language you don’t understand — I want you to hear this part especially. You do not have to understand the whole of it before you take a single step. Low Tech here certainly doesn’t. You only need the next arrow.

You Don’t Need the Map

The age we have been handed is not ours to choose. What we make of it inside is.

Frankl chose. Tolkien chose. We get to choose too — whether we let the machine think for us, or let it walk beside us while we keep our own hand firmly on the pen.

This Thursday I am going to do something here I have never done before. I am going to share a chapter from my novel What Remains Unfound— a story built on a real and shadowed corner of our own recent history. It is my own small attempt at the very thing Frankl and Tolkien did: to make some meaning out of the darkness of a time.

Written by me. Every word.

I hope you’ll walk that stretch of road with me. The arrow’s already painted on the wall.

See you Thursday.

Photo by Igor Omilaey

“From the first page to the last, this book held my attention and left me struggling to put it down. I felt its flow was excellent, and each character appealed to me in different ways. There are several sensitive issues dealt with neither in a sensationalist manner nor in a way that felt like the issues were downplayed. Rather, the author delivered a true account of these issues. He also captures an accurate description of Irish life for the time period. It has the feel of a book not written by the hand, but rather the heart.”

— Danny Donnan, Beta Reader, What Remains Unfound

If you have been following this page for a while, you may have noticed a few changes recently. A new name. A new bio. A shift in direction that I want to take a moment to explain — because you are 93 subscribers who have placed your trust in this page, and that means something to me that I find genuinely difficult to put into words.

Thank you. everyone of you. The fact that you are here, reading, sharing and commenting, is something I do not take lightly.

Finding Your Tribe — the name

I am from Galway. The City of the Tribes. It is a city built on community, on people finding their people, on the idea that belonging is something worth searching for. That is where the name comes from.

When I started this Substack, I was not entirely sure who I was writing for or what I was building. I am clearer on that now. I am looking for my tribe — the people who understand what it means to be on a journey that does not always go to plan, who are building something that matters to them, who are searching for meaning in the middle of a busy life. If that sounds like you, you are already in the right place.

The bio — why it changed

My original bio was focused almost entirely on the novel and my goal to self publish it in November 2026. That was honest at the time but it was incomplete. It told you about one part of what I do without showing you the fuller picture.

The new bio reads: I write about the courage it takes to change direction, find meaning and build a life worth living. Each week I share what I am learning — from writing my first novel, walking the Camino and years of helping people find what drives them.

That is closer to the truth of what this page is. I am a writer, yes. But I am also a Life Coach and Executive Coach with experience sitting with people who are trying to find their direction. Everything I write here comes from that place. My goal is not simply to tell you about my journey. It is to offer you something useful for yours.

The novel — a considered decision

The testimonial you read at the top of this post is from Danny Donnan, one of my beta readers. I am sharing it with his permission and with considerable gratitude. Feedback like that gives a writer the courage to keep going.

The beta readers have come back to me with responses that have been genuinely humbling. The book is ready. And that readiness has led me to a decision I want to share with you.

I am no longer pursuing self-publication in November 2026. Instead, I am actively seeking a literary agent to represent What Remains Unfound to a traditional publisher.

This is a considered choice, not a retreat. The JJ Haze series now has outlines for four books, with the first two — What Remains Unfound and Delivered — well into production. A series of this scope deserves the reach that a traditional publisher can provide. An agent and a publishing house have distribution channels, bookshop relationships and a readership base that no self published author can match on their own.

I am giving the process one year. If a publishing deal is in place by June 2027, the timeline for publication will extend a little beyond that — that is simply how traditional publishing works and I am at peace with it. If the traditional route does not produce results, I will return to self publishing with everything I have learned along the way.

In the meantime, I have time and space to do what I love most — write. The second book is written. The third is outlined. The work continues.

What is coming

Writing is not the only thing I am working on. In the coming months I will be introducing two coaching programmes that I believe will offer real value to people who are navigating change, building towards something or trying to find what drives them. I am not ready to share the details just yet — but they are coming, and I think you will find them interesting.

This page will continue every Monday. The notes will continue between posts. The conversation in the comments will continue to grow. That is the tribe being built, one week at a time.

PS: This newsletter grows one reader at a time and every share helps it reach someone new. If something here resonated with you today, passing it on costs nothing and means everything. Thank you for being part of this journey.

I want to end with a question for you.

Would you like to read a chapter of What Remains Unfound?

I am considering sharing one here — a glimpse inside the world of Detective JJ Haze and the case that will define him. But I want to know if that is something you would welcome. Let me know in the comments and your response will help me decide which chapter to share and when.

Kind Regards

Maurice P.

Photo by Mana5280 on unsplash.com

A few years ago, I was sitting with Liam, a good friend of mine, telling him about my desire to visit Thailand. I painted the picture for him — Bangkok for a few days, then travel south to one of the islands, soak it all in, visit a friend along the way. He listened. Then he asked a simple question.

Which island?

Phuket, I said, without thinking too much about it.

Then I added what most of us add when we talk about the things we want. I said, of course, these are all “pipe dreams.” I don’t have the money.

Liam said nothing for a moment. Then he asked what I needed the money for. Flights and accommodation, I told him. He thought about it a little longer and then he made me an offer. He would front the money for the bookings if I organised everything — the tours, the hotels, the flights, all of it. He knew I loved to organise. When it came time to travel, I would pay him back and we would both have the trip of a lifetime.

In 2011, Liam and I spent three weeks in Thailand. Bangkok and Phuket, the whole thing. It was one of the best experiences of my life — not just for the places we saw and the memories we made, but for the lesson it handed me before we ever boarded the plane.

The desire comes first. The means is always secondary.

Liam is still one of my closest friends. He is also, as it happens, a subscriber to this page.

I have been a Life Coach for several years. In that time, I have worked with many clients, and I have come to believe that the single most powerful thing any person can do for their own life is also the thing most people will do almost anything to avoid.

The exercise is simple. I ask clients to write down fifty things they want to do, be, have or become before they die.

That is it. Fifty desires. No filter, no practicality check, no inner voice telling you what is realistic. Just fifty things that would bring meaning to your life and to the lives of those around you.

When clients hear this, something interesting happens. They find reasons not to do it. They are busy. They will do it later. They are not sure they understand the exercise. In my experience, this resistance rarely comes from laziness. It comes from something deeper and more tender than that. Most people, when they sit down to name what they truly want, discover that they do not fully believe they deserve it.

Giving yourself permission to desire something — really desire it, without apology — turns out to be one of the hardest things a person can do. And it is the first thing. You cannot build a plan around a desire you have not yet allowed yourself to have.

So before anything else, I want to say this clearly: allow yourself to dream. At this stage, these are not goals. They are just desires. Let them be big, small, serious, frivolous, financial, creative, spiritual, relational. Write them all down. Do not overthink it. The goals come later, from choosing the best ones. First you have to let yourself want.

I do this exercise myself once a year. I have done it for many years and it has kept me energised and directed throughout my life in ways I find difficult to fully explain.

One of the desires I wrote down was to be a novelist. Another, more recently, was to perfect the art of building characters. In 2015, I became a published poet. The novel I am finishing now was on that list long before I wrote the first word of it. The Camino was on that list. Thailand was on that list before Liam ever made his offer.

The list is the ground on which all my dreams are born.

Once you have your fifty desires, the next step is to choose the ones that matter most and turn them into real goals. And real goals have to be measurable. This is where most people stumble.

If your goal is to be happy, or comfortable, or successful, I will gently push back. These are feelings, not goals. They are too vague and too subjective to work with. How will you know when you have arrived? What does happy look like on a Tuesday afternoon in November?

This is why I use SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time-bound. A goal is not I want to travel more. A goal is I will spend three weeks in Thailand in 2011 and I will organise every detail of the trip. You are the author of your life. Write it with the same precision you would demand of anything else worth doing.

What will your life look like in five years if you do not seek what you desire? In ten years? If you do not deliberately design the life you want, you will not end up with nothing — you will end up managing one crisis after another, reacting rather than creating, always slightly behind where you feel you should be.

You are the author and the designer of your own life. Embrace this!

I want to be honest with you about something. The connection between coaching and writing, for me, runs deeper than I expected when I started this journey.

Every character I write is driven by desire — whether they are aware of it or not. The best characters, like the most interesting people, are moving towards something they need even when they cannot name it. Understanding what motivates a person, what they want at the deepest level and what is holding them back from it, has made me a better writer. And writing characters who face those questions honestly has made me a better coach.

We are all, in one way or another, working towards something. The question is whether we have named it clearly enough to find our way there.

So here is my invitation to you today.

Start your list. Fifty things you want to do, be, have or become before you die. Don’t filter. Don’t judge. Don’t let the practical voice win before the dreaming voice has had its say.

And when you are ready — share one of them here in the comments. One desire that could become a goal. Something you have been carrying around quietly that deserves to be said out loud.

I would genuinely love to read it.

Because here is what I know after years of this work: the moment you name a desire and put it somewhere outside of your own head, something shifts. It stops being a pipe dream. It starts being a plan.

Ask Liam.

What Remains Unfound, the debut novel in the JJ Haze series, is currently in development for publication. Follow this page for updates on the journey.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unspash.com

The crossroads I am standing at right now is about how I publish my first novel.

I have two roads in front of me. One is self-publishing — full control, higher financial return per book, and a timeline that could have What Remains Unfound in readers’ hands by November of this year. The other is traditional publishing — finding a literary agent, submitting to publishing houses, and if the right offer comes, handing a significant degree of control to a team of professionals whose job it is to get books into bookshops, libraries, and the hands of readers I could never dream to reach on my own.

Both roads are valid. Both have merit. And for weeks now, I have been standing between them trying to decide.

Here is what I know about myself. I have wanted to be a published author for as long as I can remember. Not just someone who wrote a book — someone whose work sits on a shelf in a local bookshop, gets borrowed from a library, gets passed from one reader to another. I want to be a recognised Irish writer. There is a certain honesty required in admitting that. Call it ambition, call it ego if you like — I prefer to call it clarity. It is a specific goal, and specific goals are far more useful than vague ones.

I have invested considerably in this book — in time, in years of drafts, in professional help along the way. Money is a factor in this decision, as it is in most decisions worth making. But I have come to realise over these past weeks that money is not the deciding factor. Reach is.

I published a poetry book in 2015. I sold 247 copies. For a poetry book, I am told that is a respectable number. What I know is that the vast majority of those 247 people were people I already knew. My personal reach has a ceiling. I know where that ceiling is because I have bumped my head off it before.

Self-publishing is a powerful option for someone with an established platform, a large audience, and the drive and resources to market themselves relentlessly. I am building that platform now, here on these pages, one post at a time. But I am honest enough with myself to know that I am not there yet.

Traditional publishing, with its slower timeline and its smaller percentage, offers something I cannot give myself — a team, a reach, and a credibility that opens doors to bookshops and libraries and readers who will never find me on their own.

So that is my crossroads. The method. That is all it is.

And here is the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that settles me when the noise of the decision gets too loud.

The goal has not changed.

It was never to self-publish. It was never to be traditionally publish. Those are methods, not destinations. The goal — the one I have carried for years, through nine Camino walks, through draft after draft, through every obstacle this journey has placed in front of me — is to be a recognised Irish writer whose work reaches and resonates with readers. That goal is the same regardless of which road I take to get there.

Also, as a Life Coach, there is one question I return to again and again when I sit with a client who is stuck at a crossroads. It is not a complicated question. It does not require a whiteboard or a framework or a long process. It is simply this:

What is your ultimate goal, and why does it matter to you?

That is it. Two parts. The what and the why.

The what gives you direction. The why gives you the fuel to keep going when the road gets difficult — and it will get difficult, regardless of which road you choose. When you are clear on both, the crossroads stops being paralysing. The method becomes a practical decision rather than an existential one. You choose the road most likely to get you to the destination, and you start walking.

I am not paralysed by my crossroads. I am standing at it with my eyes open, asking the question, and listening honestly to my own answer.

I want to turn that question over to you now.

Because I suspect I am not the only one standing at a crossroads this week. You might be further along your road than you expected to be by now. You might be questioning the method you chose. You might be carrying the weight of investment — financial, emotional, physical — and wondering whether the destination is still worth it.

So let me ask you what I ask my clients.

What are you working on right now — and what crossroads is holding you up or holding you back?

It does not have to be a book. It does not have to be a career. It can be anything — a relationship, a project, a decision that has been sitting on your shoulder for longer than it should. Name the crossroads. Then ask yourself the question. What is the ultimate goal, and why does it matter?

The crossroads is just the method. The goal is yours. It was always yours.

And if you are willing to share it, I am willing to listen. That, after all, is what I do.

What Remains Unfound, the debut novel in the JJ Haze series, is currently in development for publication. Follow this page for updates on the journey.

I have walked the Camino de Santiago nine times. Mostly the Francés — the classic route, the one that stretches from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the French Pyrenees all the way to the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. Mostly for two to three week periods going from 250 to 450 kms at a time. Nine times I have laced my boots, swung my pack onto my back, and stepped out onto that road. And every single time, it has given me something I did not know I needed.

I first walked the Camino over a decade ago for personal and spiritual reasons. I was heavy in weight and heavy in other ways too. I am not the same person who took those first steps. The Camino had something to do with that — the weight I lost over the years of walking, but more than that, the weight of other things I set down along the road and chose not to pick back up.

There is something that happens to the mind after two or three days of walking. The noise fades. The endless internal chatter that follows most of us through our lives begins to slow, and then quietens. By the end of a week, I can walk without thinking at all — and it is the only place on the planet where I have found that to be true. But here is the thing about that silence: it is not empty. It is extraordinarily productive. When I choose to think on the Camino, I think clearly. Plots untangle. Characters reveal themselves. The path ahead — both on the road and on the page — becomes easier to see.

The Camino is where “What Remains Unfound” was shaped. Not written — I wrote that in Wexford, over many drafts — but shaped. The characters who drive that novel, the paths they take and the obstacles placed in front of them, were formed on those trails. The rhythm of walking long distances, day after day, gives you an unusual relationship with the idea of a journey. You understand, in your bones, that progress is rarely straight. That there are days when the weather turns and the road is harder than you expected, and it is not so pleasant to be yourself. But you also understand that you keep going. You focus on where you are, and you focus on where you are going, and you get back on track.

That is what my characters do. That is, in many ways, what the novel is about — people driven by something within them, whether they fully understand that drive or not, moving through obstacles towards something they need to find. I did not plan that parallel. The Camino taught it to me.

In 2022, I got a blister on my right foot. No big deal. It happens all the time. It became a foot ulcer that became infected. What followed over several months of treatment led to an amputation of a small part of my right foot. My surgeon, when I had healed enough to hear it, told me I should walk the Camino again when I was ready. It took a couple of years. In 2025, I went back.

I was slower than most people on that road. I walked about 160 kms before my ankle gave out, and I had to stop. By most measures, it was an incomplete Camino. But I was back on that road. I was moving through Rabanal again, watching the light change on the mountain, and I knew — in the way the Camino always tells you these things without words — that I could finish what I had started. Not just the walk. The book. The whole journey of becoming a writer.

I always feel, after a Camino, that I can do anything I set my mind to. I felt that even more in 2025.

The Camino strips things back. At home, I have tried to recreate what it teaches me — letting go of unnecessary material things, clearing space, keeping only what matters. That simplicity finds its way into how I write. Scenes that are overcrowded get walked back to their essentials. A character who is carrying too much gets lightened until you can see who they really are.

But the greatest lessons have come from the people. I have made lifelong friends on that road — fellow pilgrims I would not have met anywhere else on earth, who walked with me and stayed in my life long after we reached Santiago. The Camino gathers all kinds. You will walk beside a retired teacher from South Korea, a young German student, a grandmother from Brazil, and a born-again Christian from somewhere in the American Northwest who is absolutely certain he has found the only truth worth finding.

I walked with that man for a few days once. We were very different people. But on the Camino, you have time, and you have silence, and if you are wise, you use both. I made a deal with him. One full day, I would listen to him — really listen, ask questions, try to understand his faith from the inside. The following day, he would do the same for me. He agreed.

I grew up Catholic, so I am reasonably well versed in the Bible. I listened. I asked. He answered. The following day, I shared what drives me spiritually — what tools I use to get through my days, the internal compass I navigate by. On the third morning, we both concluded that both ways had merit. That both worked for the people who carried them. We did not try to become each other. We simply understood each other a little better than the world usually allows.

That is the Camino in a sentence.

I am less religious now than when I first walked that road. I am driven more by what is within me than by what is around me. But what I have found, again and again, among pilgrims of every background and belief, is unity and acceptance. There is room on that road for everyone. There is something powerful waiting for anyone who chooses to walk it — and I say that not as a recruitment pitch, but as a plain statement of what I have witnessed over and over.

If you have never walked the Camino, I want you to know that it is not simply a long walk. It is a journey that teaches you things about yourself that no other road will. It will give you silence when you need it, company when you need that, and a clarity about what actually matters that is very difficult to find in ordinary life.

It helped me find my writing voice. It helped me craft my novel. It helped me find the way back many times and many different ways and in doing so reminded me that an incomplete journey is still a journey worth taking.

There is always tomorrow’s road.

Buen Camino.

Thanks so much — Maurice

I have been studying serial killers for most of my life. I have always been interested in their motives and particularly, what drove them to commit their crimes.

Not clinically or academically. but more in the way that certain dark questions follow you — what makes a person cross that line? What rules do they follow? What face do they show the world while carrying what they carry?

When I began writing What Remains Unfound, I wasn’t starting from scratch. I was drawing on decades of fascination with one of the most disturbing corners of human behaviour. And what two years of writing taught me is this — knowing about serial killers and actually climbing inside one’s mind are two very different things.

The ordinariness is what gets you

The detail that has stayed with me longest from all my years of research isn’t from a crime scene report or a psychological profile. It’s from the women who knew Gary Ridgeway — the Green River Killer, convicted of murdering 48 women.

His wife said she didn’t know. That alone is chilling enough. But what genuinely unsettled me was this — the women on the streets described him as gentle. He tipped well. They felt comfortable in his car. He was, by all accounts, a regular guy.

He killed 48 women and remained invisible to police for years precisely because he didn’t fit the profile. There was no monster to see.

That detail lives in What Remains Unfound.

The misconception Hollywood gets wrong

Crime fiction and film tend to portray serial killers as visibly disturbed — strange, unsettling, obviously dangerous. The reality is almost always the opposite.

Serial killers are generally of high intelligence deliberately presenting as average. Ted Bundy was so charming that the judge at his trial remarked he would have been glad to see him as a lawyer in his court — under any other circumstances. John Wayne Gacy hosted neighbourhood parties. BTK became a pastor and a part time police officer, stopping his killings for eighteen years when his daughter was born and resuming when she turned eighteen.

Edmund Kemper — six foot nine, IQ of 145, killer of ten young women — spent his evenings in a police bar discussing the case with the detectives assigned to find him. He eventually called the police himself to confess. He had grown bored that nobody was looking for him.

These are not monsters who looked like monsters. They are men who understood exactly how to be seen as safe.

What writing my killer did to me

Creating the killer in What Remains Unfound — a character I will not describe in detail here, because some things are better discovered on the page — required me to go somewhere I did not enjoy going.

I had to see things from his point of view. Not to justify him. Not to explain him away. But to make him real enough that readers would feel genuinely disturbed rather than safely entertained.

I found it frightening. There were sessions at the laptop where I had to stop, close the computer and walk away. The ending of this book in particular made me wonder if I had gone too far into his mind.

I didn’t like being the killer. But the story demanded it.

A close friend’s question

A few years ago I gave someone close to me a chapter to read. It was the chapter where the killer is alone with his victim — the only chapter in the novel written from that perspective of the victim in full detail.

My friend read the chapter and then was awkward about talking about it. I wondered was it any good. Did my grammar or spelling show me up? It took nearly two weeks to convince her to have dinner with me so I could ask what they thought. She had only one question.

“Was this you — or were you writing about someone doing these things?”

I confirmed it was the latter.

“Then it is great,” they said.

That was the moment I knew my killer chapter had worked.

Molly

I should mention that throughout two years of writing a serial killer, I had help staying human.

My dog Molly insisted on four walks a day regardless of where my head was at. On those walks, in the Wexford air, I came back to myself. A killer’s mind in the morning. Fresh air and a dog who didn’t care about any of it by lunchtime.

I recommend this approach to anyone writing darkness. Get a dog. Walk often. Come back.

What Remains Unfound publishes November 2026. If you’d like to follow the journey, subscribe at mauricepoconnell.substack.com.

— Maurice

It was around 1995 when I first walked into the offices of the Missing Persons Helpline in the inner city of Dublin.

I had accompanied a friend who volunteered there. The helpline was run entirely by volunteers and operated from a first floor room — a modest space with an office and several phone lines. Every week volunteers gathered to man those phones. The idea was simple and humane: if someone who had gone missing wanted their family to know they were safe but didn’t want to be found, they could ring the helpline. The helpline would then contact the family and pass on the message. No location. No pressure. Just the knowledge that their son or daughter was alive.

Some calls came. Some families got that message.

Others are still waiting.

On the wall of that room hung a large map of Ireland. On the map were pins — each one marking the last known sighting of a missing person. Male and female. Young and not so young. Each pin had a file attached — whatever was known about the case, which in many instances was very little.

I would stand and stare at that map.

I don’t know exactly how long I stood there on any given evening or what I was looking for. But something about those pins — the geography of loss spread across the island, the silence around each one — stayed with me in a way I couldn’t explain and couldn’t shake.

That was thirty years ago. What Remains Unfound is the novel that was born in that room.

It is a work of fiction. It has an ending — whereas in truth, none existed for several of those pins on that wall, even up to today. Some families are still waiting. I have never forgotten that, and I hope this novel reflects the seriousness with which I have carried their stories, even in fictionalised form.

This is where the JJ Haze series begins. Not in my imagination, but on a wall in Dublin, in 1995, with pins on a map.

I’m glad you’re here to read it.

— Maurice

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