My ten-year-old is practising for a piano exam and finding it tricky. The Scarlatti Minuet is half-remembered: the bass line forgotten, the fingering more fiddly than before. She plays a couple of dramatic, minor chords then curves off the piano stool balletically. "I'm playing something else," she insists, as she hangs upside down.

And so she starts to learn an alternative piece: a perky Allegro by Clementi. C major and its related G major where the Scarlatti was C minor; a far easier to manage 4/4. Her fingers fly across the keys; the perfect cadences so much more automatic than the Scarlatti's dissonant, imperfect ones.

Her piano teacher wants her to persist with the more complex piece: the sad little melody that fills my head long after I've forgotten the anodyne, jaunty Clementi. And yet, to get it right, she will need to take it apart. She must rethink the fingering; make the rhythm precise; get the dynamics, the phrasing, the odd misremembered note absolutely secure.

I've been thinking a lot about this this week as I've plodded on, redrafting my second novel. For, panicked about my deadline, and knowing it wasn't right but not knowing how to fix it, I opted for a bit of Clementi: throwing bright jauntiness and some basic C major at a tale with a far darker heart. Luckily my clever editor was having none of it. She saw my discordant novel for what it  was: a draft in which one timeline - the bass, if you like; or the story that's set in the past - moves resolutely into a minor key - while the treble, or the present day story, insisted on chirping along in its major key, tone-deaf and oblivious to the darker, more interesting rumblings. Imagine playing two hands of the piano in different keys and that's effectively what you had.

Persisting with the Clementi-like plot was not an option and so I've been doing the equivalent of relearning the Scarlatti: though in my case this has meant not just developing characters and darkening plot strands but chucking out and rewriting 30,000 words. Interviewed by Rebecca Mascull last week, I talked about how I'd drawn up a grid for my first novel and seen the different plot lines interweaving polyphonically, like a Baroque counterpoint. This novel has a different structure, with distinct, more equally balanced past and present stories. I've worked relentlessly on the bass line - the past plot - and now it's the turn of the treble - or the present -  to sing just as sweetly but with more melancholy, more light and shade, than before. 

For getting this second novel right matters immensely and so I push on, worrying away at the rhythm of paragraphs and the freshness of the imagery; checking that a character is psychologically consistent. Fretting about pace; and tension; and balance -  just as I once practised my flute obsessively, for hour after hour. 

My daughter is back at the piano stool, scrutinising the Scarlatti. And tentatively, she plays first the right hand, then the left one. Rethinking, relearning. Figuring it all out, once more.

When I started writing The Art of Baking Blind, I was so preoccupied with the British obsession with baking it didn't occur to me that it might appeal elsewhere. Which was pretty blinkered, I realised this week, as I spent three days in Paris promoting the French edition of the novel - or La Meillure d'Entre Nous.

I hadn't been to the capital for ten years, and had forgotten that every street seems to boast not just one, but two or three patisseries or salon du thes or boutique shops selling just a few choice profiteroles or macarons. These weren't just shop windows filled with garish blasts of colour - the vibrant reds of a giant tarte aux fraises; the eggy yellow slabs of clafoutis; the rich curls of dark chocolate - such as those seen here: 

These were more like exquisite jeweller's shops, with the wares laid out beneath glass cabinets - and the prices so high, one hardly dared to ask. Shops like this one in Le Marais, which sold only profiteroles - some flavoured with rose water and decorated with gold leaf:

Or Bontemps, perhaps 100 metres away, which sold exquisite sable biscuits sandwiched with mango, citron, vanilla or chocolate creme pat - and showcased its flans behind vintage duck-egg blue cabinets and on antique plates:

Little wonder, then, that when Livre de Poche held an evening for bloggers - or blogeurs - in Colorova, a stylish patisserie/librarie in the Jardins de Luxembourg area, a good 25 of them turned up. Even though the weather was glorious - a heady 21 or 22C - and the parks were crammed with Parisiens basking in the first real heat of spring.

They listened attentively as my publisher, Veronique Cardi, enthused about the book and I read a speech, explaining the novel's genesis and themes, that I'd prepared in French. And no one looked disdainful as I fumbled my way through their questions, mixing my grammatical constructions and sometimes turning to the novel's translator, Alice Delarbe, when the vocabulary defeated me. Why were many of the men unsympathetic? (Necessary dramatically); Why were the cakes technical and not as creative as French constructions? (We're not as good at baking as you; to which they nodded.) Why was I obsessed with motherhood? (I'm not obsessed; but I found it a profound experience. It's more women in general - their conflicting needs and roles; and the pressures they impose on themselves - who fascinate me.) 

Talking to Alice Delarbe, the novel's translator, and, second from left, the director of Livre de Poche, Veronique Cardi.

It was a real joy to hear readers' takes on the novel; and to be told by one, for instance, that it conjured up memories of a patissiere grandmother and moved her in a way no novel about food had before; or by another that she didn't usually read "girlie books" - "Do you mean women's fiction?" I asked, gently - but, and this was said with genuine surprise: "I really enjoyed this: it was intelligent!"

And then we were let loose on the champagne and the patisserie. And what patisserie! My novel features a tarte au citron in the first chapter - "The viscous yellow glows against the crisp golden pastry, blind-baked to perfection" - and this later appears malevolent (if a pudding can be malevolent). "The triangles sit quivering in the gloaming. The fluorescent yellow filling wobbling, tantalising her. "Eat me, eat me."" 

And so Livre de Poche, with an attention to detail that would befit the best baker, arranged for the patisserie to involve citron mousse and creme pat, perhaps with a mango coulis thrown in. The Paul Sesame (a pun on Paul Cezanne) involved passion fruit gel on a mousse au citron, sesame tuile, black sesame creme pat, citron creme pat and black sesame shortcrust, all topped with a tiny, sesame dusted meringue. I managed one - the citron creme pat rich yet refreshing - and, despite my best efforts, was later defeated by a second.

The next day, we did it again. Not such exquisite patisserie but delicacies made by customers of Mots en Marges (http://www.motsenmarge.com), a bookshop run by Nathalie Iris, who reviews books each week on French breakfast TV. Buoyed by giving a radio interview in French, I spent a couple of hours chatting to around 50 enthusiastic readers, who talked at length about what food, and baking in particular, meant to them.

I had recipe books pressed on me, and delicate canales de Bordeaux - tiny pastries with meltingly-soft custard centres and a caramelised crust -  and a speciality walnut, parsley and olive bread made by Nathalie. One customer told me she had spent the day reading my novel and making 100 macarons in seven different flavours - blackberry, citron, pistachio, vanilla, chocolate etc - for a friend's macaron pyramid birthday cake. "You're a good friend," I commented, as I bit into her light-as-air pistachio creation and listened to the tiny coos from other women, doing the same; and she shrugged and said: "It was nothing." As Jenny, one of my characters, says: "Food is love."

With Nathalie Iris at Mots en Marge, her bookshop in La Garenne Colombe.

Perhaps it isn't so surprising, then, that these readers are interested in a novel about baking. For this is a culture that not only appreciates food - and spends far more of it than us Brits - but values the perfectionism and obsessive attention to detail that marks out many a baker - and is prepared to pay a high price for it.

"The bakes in your novels are technical but not creative like those we make in France. Why is that?" the journalist Elsa Menanteau (www.pournouslesfemmes.com) asked. And while part of that may be a failing of my writing, I do believe that our bakes, and by implication our culture, are not as exacting as those of the French. The perfectionism required by these jewel-like patisserie steps up a level here.

Watching these slim, stylish women, who view gateau as a treat to be indulged in occasionally, I hoped they would be kind to the vastly-inferior bakers in The Art of Baking Blind. And perhaps they will. For the reviewers understood that this is a novel about being a woman as much as about baking. As a glorious review in French Elle puts it: "The novel, more subtle than one might imagine, effectively pinpoints the diktats that society imposes on women: motherhood sold as the panacea or the tyranny of slimness. Devour at once."

As I bought my profiteroles, before catching the Eurostar back home, I told the young shop assistant I'd just written a novel about why we bake. (I am shameless about it now and hustle everywhere.)

She raised a perfectly-arched eyebrow, this woman who had just sold over 20 euros of choux pastry to the previous customer, and I could swear she rolled her eyes.

"Now that," she said. "Is a very good question."

“Have you always wanted to write?”

It’s something I’m often asked when I announce – still rather self-consciously – that I’m a novelist. And the answer, of course, is yes. 

Writing’s what I do, what I’ve done throughout my entire career, even if the idea of writing a novel seemed pure fiction – a dream I could barely admit to anyone bar myself – for years.

When I was ten, I won a children’s writing competition, Devon Young Writer of the Year, with a story about some Cornish standing stones. The prize was £75 in cash, £50 in book vouchers - and a trip to Hodder and Stoughton.

The trip was never organized and I stopped writing as the demands of adolescence – exams and friendship problems – crowded in. I can clearly remember fearing that my imagination – which had plagued and delighted me as a small child – was ebbing away. 

I still read of course. I was that girl who hunkered under the duvet with a torch and raced through books way into the night: fighting off sleep to finish just the next chapter, and then the next. And so I went to Oxford to read English, barely believing that someone would pay for me to curl up and read novels for three years. (I was lucky: I got a full grant and this was before tuition fees.) 

I also began to write, not just the two essays a week required for my degree but features and reviews for Cherwell, the university newspaper. And that paper was my passport to a career in print. It still didn’t occur to me that I could write a novel: literature, my degree had taught me, was largely the preserve of dead white men. But I thought I could be a journalist.

After five months spent learning Pitman shorthand and media law in Hastings, I spent two years as a news trainee at the Press Association and eleven at the Guardian as a news reporter, health correspondent and – in the dying years of the Blair administration – a political correspondent. I loved it. It taught me to write every day, on deadline, to a prescribed length, but more importantly it enabled me to be curious. Why are they saying that? What’s the real issue – the back story, if you like, or the agenda? Why are they behaving in that way?

Of course, like many hacks, what I really wanted to do was write a novel but fear of failure – and life, in the form of two small children – stopped me. I charted other journalists who’d published books but the idea of writing 100,000 words rather than six or eight hundred at most, seemed a bit of a stumbling block. With a news article, you have the security blanket of research and all these quotes from those you’ve interviewed which you have to compress. With a novel, there’s no such safety net – and none of the authority implied by your paper. It’s just you and your imagination – and why would anyone want to know about that?

I left the Guardian and started freelancing and, as my youngest neared school age – and I neared 40 – the itch to write grew stronger still. I wittered on to one of my two book clubs about wanting to do a creative writing MA but not having the money or not being good enough.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Sarah,” one of my friends, a former colleague, interrupted me mid flow.

“You don’t need a course. You just need to get on with it.”

And so I began.

In the week I turned 40, and my youngest started school, I looked at the 10,000 words of the novel I’d tentatively started and came up with a plan. I would get it written and published within a year and if I couldn’t I would have to get a proper job. 

To everyone’s amazement – not least mine – the plan paid off. The Art of Baking Blind was sold in a pre-empt to Hodder & Stoughton in October 2013, and 30 years after my promised visit, I arrived at Hodder’s offices to celebrate my two–book deal. The novel was published in hardback in July 2014 and will be published in paperback this August. At present, it has also been sold to publishers in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Poland and Brazil. Each of these editions will come out this year and you can see some of the covers here.

So what happens now? Well, I am currently editing the second novel, to be published in hardback in early 2016. It’s been a rougher ride than my first novel – written in a glorious rush of excitement - but it’s honed my skills. It’s making me believe I can call myself a novelist, after all. 

Now, when I’m asked if I’ve always wanted to write, I am less self-conscious. Yes, I say, with a smile.

Writing – and now writing a novel – is what I do.