What do you believe in when almost no one believes in you? For me, it's come down to two things: God and the story idea that He has given me. Apart from working myself to death, there's really nothing else I can do than believe.
 Nobody seems to believe I'm an author. On the one hand, I find it hilarious. On the other hand, I find it tremendously irritating. Every since I was five years old, I tried to get people to believe that I wanted to be an author - that I seriously wanted to be an author. Most people had the impression that I wasn't serious - that it was a fad that I was going to pass through. I had to work really hard just to make them understand that I liked writing and that I actually wanted to write a book.
 After I got published in a teenage anthology, a few people told me that I was an author. But sometimes it feels like the general consensus is that until you get a whole book of your own published, you are not a real author. You're a partial author. You've written a few pages of something decent - well done! Now try four hundred pages.
 Ouch.
 When I got a literary agent, people began to take me more seriously, and it felt glorious. And now, at long last, I have a publisher. But my books aren't out yet, and as result, not many people believe me when I say that I'm an author. Even when I say that I have a publishing company, people raise their eyebrows. My music students in particular are very amusing. I tell them that I'm an author. Many of them sit there and say:
 "No. No, you're not an author."
 "But I am."
 "No, you're not. I've never heard of you. I haven't got your autograph."
 "Look dear, I'm not that type of author. But I am an author of sorts."
 "Well, you're not really a real author."
 "Uh, yes, I am."
 "No, you're not."
 Then the child leans forward and says, with the same sympathy that a good doctor will have for the inmate of an asylum:
 "You're actually a music teacher."
 Clearly, I'm having an identity crisis when I write books then. I think the "My-Teacher-Does-Nothing-Else-But-Teach-Me-and-She-Lives-In-a-School-or-Studio" is a universal disease that students have, because I've encountered this attitude surprisingly often. I love my students. But this is a flaw many of them have.

 So what is an author at heart to do when no one else believes they're an author? When trying to prove yourself just doesn't do any good? I come back to my initial point. One has to believe.
 God is a critical part of my life. I cannot do without Him. He's saved me from Hell in this life and in the next. Lots of people think Christians just live to die. That's not how it is at all - at least, not with the ones that really count. We live to do better, to bring a little bit of heaven into this life if we can - and this not through ourselves, but through God and the salvation He has brought us.
 It's this belief that's sustained me through my writing journey. When I was ten, I was convinced that God had given me particular ideas and desires for a reason. So I wrote. Even now, I still believe that there's a special purpose for the story that I'm telling. I don't know what it is, and I don't know what will happen to it. I don't even know if anyone will like it. But I know that there's a reason. And that's enough for me.
 Why do you write?

One of the most annoying parts of being a writer is when people ask you to summarise your book. And you stand there thinking:

 “If I had wanted it to be written in two hundred words, I wouldn’t have a penned a novel.”

 But instead, you struggle to say something meaningful:

 “Well, it’s sort of a Victorian fantasy/romance/paranormal/slightly-off-the-beaten-track/thing, except with cake-makers. And the people are sort of different, but just like you and me … and the book’s for all ages, but especially suited to anyone between fifteen and sixty-five.”

 The person who asked you for a summary stares back blankly.

 Recently, I’ve been doing metadata for my publishing company. In my metadata questionnaire, there are all these requests to summarise my book in a particular number of characters. At first this worried me. Now I actually somewhat enjoy it.

 I’ve discovered numerous purposes for working on summaries – irritating though that can be – and I’d like to share some with you.

1.      Hooking power.

A good summary can make your book sound attractive. A bad summary can completely switch your intended audience off.

2.      Selling power

If you have a good summary, you can use it in your query letters to literary agents and publishers, potentially. Although, this does need to be treated with caution – you can’t have any cliff hangers in the summaries you send to these professionals. They need to know the whole story before they want to buy it. They’re too busy to bother with: “What happened to Johnny next?”

3.      Understanding your own story

A good summary enables you to see your own story from a bird’s eye view, for the possibly the first time in your life. It’s so easy to get bogged down in the details. Pulling right back and penning a summary allows you to see what your book is actually about. Big plot ideas become apparent, and it’s easy to see whether they work or not. If your idea stands up to scrutiny in this format, then it has a better chance standing up to scrutiny in book format.

 Summaries are fiendishly hard to write, because they force an author to see their work in a new way. But because of the reasons above, I now find the process invaluable. So … can you give me a quick summary of your work?

 In the past week, I've had several moments where I think I've completely lost the file of an updated book - or completely lost my only file of a book. What ensues is normally a hair-tearing scene during which I start thumping my desk furiously, sweating, yelling randomly at my laptop, and praying at the top of my voice. I stay up too late while I try to find the file. Then I give up in frustration and flop into bed, mentally cursing laptops everywhere.
 In the morning, I wake up, shove breakfast into my body, and frantically hunt through the files of my laptop again. After a frustrating half hour, I have found the file.
 Phew. 
 And then I do it again an hour later. 

 I think it's inevitable that if you write lots, you will wind up losing some of your work by mistake.
 Once, when I was in the music studio awaiting a student's arrival, I was typing up some more work on the sixth book of my series. The student walked through the door, and I highlighted my work, quickly checked the word count and - oops, pressed the wrong button. Microsoft Word turned grey in a heartbeat and vanished, leaving my desktop blank.
 "I have a nasty feeling that didn't save," I said to the student.
 Sure enough, when I had a break between lessons later, I discovered that I had lost two thousand words. When I was about thirteen and this happened, I would stage some kind of lament. Nowadays, I just go:
 "That's the way it is."
 But at the same time I get super angry. I start shaking my fist at random people, and they look at me as if I'm the inmate of an asylum.
 But the fact is that there is no easy part of the writing process. It's difficult. It's gruelling. And when you lose a whole lot of work, you're faced with the oh-so-wonderful task of redoing it. I love writing. But I don't like having to rewrite unnecessarily.
 When I was fourteen, I typed an entire chapter on my sister's laptop. I made to pull the laptop closer to me, so that I could see my work better. And the plug came out of the back.
 Now, normally this isn't a problem. But this was an old laptop. The screen flickered and the disk made a "kapoooowwt" noise. With a scream, I watched my work become a smaller and smaller square in the screen. Then it vanished altogether. Darkness.
 AAARGH.
 I shook the laptop and shouted at it, but that didn't help much.
 Then I remembered auto save. Phew. That should have done the trick.
 Oh. Oh no. I had written the chapter into an email, so that I could send it to the computer I normally used. This was before dropbox.
 AAAAAAAARGH.
 Phew. Breathe deeply. Never mind. I'll just rewrite it ...

 Like I have so many times before.

 I'm used to old laptops. After this, I owned one that used freeze. The screen would flash fitfully, and if you pressed any keys, the laptop would say "BOOOOOOORP" (which can be roughly translated as "don't you dare try anything"). I would shut it down and restart it. The computer would do its usual thing of "Toshiba: in touch with tomorrow", directly followed by a screen saying "Windows 98". Then I would open the document. Had it auto saved? No.
 More fist-shaking.
 After this, I owned a laptop that was silver and almost as old as the one that said: "BOOOOOOOORP". This silver laptop would get so hot that you could melt plastic on it. You could see the steam rising from the keyboard. Occasionally, the laptop got so annoyed with me that it would just freeze as well.
 I also owned a regular desktop computer. This one worked beautifully, except when it didn't. I would be typing away, and all of sudden, it would decide it had had enough. Everything would turn black. The fan would make a sound like: "Whop, whop, whop, whop." Had it auto saved? No.
 You can imagine how I would work feverishly on this machine, saving every five seconds, typing so quickly that the sweat flew from my fingers in droplets as I tried to make sure I got in as much as work as possible before the computer decided its break was due.
 The wonderful thing about all these computers was that they were free, and I was immensely grateful for that. But I took the risk of working them hard, and that's what happened. My anger management issue probably got worse during this time.

 I now have a very good Lenovo computer. But I still manage to lose files, corrupt files, and do all kinds of terrible things with them. I'm beginning to wonder if it's not the computers but me. 
 Anyway, there is one solution to all of these catastrophes: drink coffee. Lots of it.
 And if that made sense to you, then you can count yourself a writer.
 

 I have this really old laptop that does not have enough space on it for it to run the internet. My Dad saw it on my desk the other day and asked bemusedly why I've kept it when I have a perfectly good lenovo laptop.
 If I'm honest, I can summarise the reason in one word: internet.
 I have to admit that I'm as susceptible as the next person. Facebook has these flashing notifications that come with booping noises, and they distract me from my work. Every time I get a new email, Thunderbird shows it to me in the lower right corner of my screen. These two things - email and Facebook - have successfully derailed a number of my editing and writing sessions. I'm sure both these programs are conspiring to make fools of me.
 So every now and then, I fire up this old laptop - which is affectionately called "The Brick" because it's about as heavy as one. Then I work for an hour and a half. Later, I resurface after a successful editing session.
 No internet! My strategy worked like a charm.
 
 Everything today seems to be so immediate. Twitter notifications, Facebook notifications, and the like all show up on the home screen of your phone. You're busy writing, and someone decides to chat with you on Facebook. Things start flashing and booping.
 Goodbye work time. Hello fun - I think ... 
 I say this because Facebook is possibly one of the most boring inventions ever. I literally just scroll through the feed several times a day. I don't really do anything on Facebook. It's just there. And there are all these annoying profile pics that get changed every day and all these people bragging about their accomplishments or trying to elicit sympathy for some cryptic situation they haven't outlined. Looking at Facebook is like stopping work just to spy on your neighbours for a while. To quote Monty Python: "It's dull, dull, dull, and desperately dull." 
 But unfortunately, I have to admit, Facebook is distracting. This is why I fasted from internet for a while this afternoon. Any time you want to get something done, I advise you to do the same. Writers can't live without the internet - this is true. They need it for research and advertising and all that stuff. But we can't always work with it.