READ: How To Get Published in Just 50 Easy Steps. PDF, EPUB online free reviews.

(Did you miss me? After the craziness of the Distress Signals month-long blogging bonanza, I decided to give you all a month off from me. Well, a month and a bit. Also, since I last blogged WordPress have hidden the ‘justify paragraph’ button from me and it is driving. Me. CUCKOO. I can’t even look at this left-aligned. Oh my God. Deep breaths. Wait! Keyboard shortcuts! YES. Okay. It’s all okay. Everything’s going to be okay. Breathe… Okay. Anyway.)

As of February 1, this little blog is a staggering SEVEN years old. One of the first posts I published on here was a tongue-in-cheek How To Write A Novel in 37 Easy Steps. So, seven years and a bit on, and to break my post-blogging-bonanza fast, I’ve decided to update that – or rather, continue it.

How To Get Published in Just 50 Easy Steps!

Decide, aged 8, that you are going to be a novelist.

Ask Santa for a typewriter.

Ask your parents for an electronic typewriter.

Ask your parents for a PC.

Spend much of your late teens carrying the first three chapters of your first attempt at a novel, a Formula 1-themed thriller named Chequered Flag, around on a floppy disk. By ‘novel’ read ‘excuse to daydream about Jacques Villeneuve’s abs on the cover of Jacques Villeneuve: A Champion in Pictures’…

Sorry, drifted off there.

Avoid studying for your own Leaving Cert, i.e. the final exams in Irish school, by writing a funny but quite pointless YA novel about avoiding studying for the Leaving Cert. Submit it to a publisher whose office is 5 minutes’ drive from your house, because you think geographical proximity will help seal the deal.

Get rejected.

Tell your parents you need a laptop ‘for college’.

Go to college.

Drop out of college.

Go to NYC for a week’s holiday and think this qualifies you to write from the POV of a NYPD detective. Submit your (god awful) attempt at a detective novel via post to a top London agent and get so swiftly rejected that SAE arrives back at your house before you do.

Stop writing. Pretend that reading books about writing will move you closer to your published novelist dreams in the meantime.

Quit your crappy job working in a greeting card store.

Quit your pleasantly boring job working in an auctioneer’s office.

Take a job in the Netherlands.

Take a job in France.

Take a job in Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

Buy John Mayer’s Continuum album and put ‘Stop This Train’ on repeat for 36 days. (This is KEY.)

Go backpacking in Central America.

Start writing a book about number 18 after you return home to Cork.

Find an agent who is interested in said book but cannot represent you on the strength of it due to there being only about 23 people in the whole world who’d be interested in reading it and even less in buying it (probably).

Tell agent you are already writing a novel. (This is a big fat LIE.)

Decide you can’t write the novel because your soul-destroying job is slowly but surely sucking all the life force out of your blackening soul and if you don’t do something about it soon your heart will be an empty abyss of abandoned dreams, bitterness and contempt.

Quit your job – in the middle of a devastating economic recession, for maximum dramatic effect.

Put a MacBook on your credit card, because you simply cannot work under these conditions.

Use your savings to relocate to an isolated and slightly scary holiday home by the sea (in winter, in Ireland) with two coffee machines and your new computer.

Write a comic, corporate satire, chick-litty novel. Describe it The Devil Wears Prada meets Weightwatchers.

Start submitting the novel to agents and editors.

Buy John Mayer’s new Battle Studies album and put the song Assassins on repeat for thirteen days. (No, really. This is KEY.)

Self-publish the Disney book, i.e. Mousetrapped.

Read an article about cruise ship disappearances in a magazine that someone left behind them in a café that your mum was in shortly before she picked it up and brought it home.

Write a book about number 20.

Self-publish that book, i.e. Backpacked.

Get a meeting at a Major Publishing House by way of your friend Vanessa. The MPH don’t like the Weightwatchers Prada book, but they do like your writing. Tell them you’ll write something else.

Writing something else (well, a synopsis and three chapters of it) and send it to the MPH.

Writing something else else (well, a synopsis and three chapters of it) and send it to the MPH.

Write something else else else (well, a synopsis and three chapters of it) and sent it to the MPH.

Go for a meeting at the MPH and get offered freelance work using social media to promote their commercial fiction titles instead. Be very excited about this.

Get an idea for a thriller from number 32. Write 30,000 words of it.

Stop.

Buy John Mayer’s Born and Raised and put the title track on repeat for the entire month of May.

Let a year pass.

Struggle to find anything to play on repeat on Mayer’s Paradise Valley. *tear*

Decide to apply to return to university as a mature student to student English Literature.

Panic when you actually get in, as this necessitates a move to Dublin. Use the panic to push past the 30,000 barrier and finish the thriller. Call it Dark Waters. Start submitting it to agents.

Go to college. Stay this time. Use this as a distraction from the UTTER DEVASTATION OF REJECTION.

Unexpectedly get offer of representation from dream agent while sitting in a coffee-shop near college waiting for your American Genres lecture and looking out at grey and gloomy rain. (Hooray!)

Work with agent’s amazing in-house editor to write a second draft of the thriller. Change the name to Adrift.

Get a 2-book deal. (Bigger hooray!) Change book’s name to Distress Signals. Start buying everything you see with an anchor on it and planning your book launch like it’s your wedding.

If you want to read Distress Signals, check it out here for Ireland/UK and here for the USA. Also if you’re in Dublin this Saturday, I’m chairing a panel on self-publishing at the Irish Writers’ Centre Women Aloud NI IWD event. Get more info on that here.

Also, on a more serious note, there’s an update on the Irish resident accused of murdering his wife on the MSC Magnifica. In a line that could’ve come from Distress Signals, his lawyer has said to reporters, ‘If this was murder, where is the body? Where are the witnesses?’ (There are neither because, of course, this is a cruise ship.) A working theory is that he allegedly stuffed her body into a suitcase and threw it from the balcony of their Deck 11 cabin. You can read more about this terrible case here.

Next time on Catherine’s blog: the Great Desk Redesign of 2017! It involves an actual pink typewriter. AN ACTUAL ONE.