My second book, The Magical Properties of Plants... and How to Find Them is almost published. The proofs have been painstakingly checked and sent back, corrections made, and now it's just a matter of waiting. As far as I know, publication date is 1st November or thereabouts.

It's a bit like giving birth in a way... I know roughly what it will look like, but not the detail. It will have illustrations that I finished earlier in the year, but I don't know exactly where they will end up in the text. One, which was drawn to resemble a woodcut, heads up every chapter.

I always like the way my publishers put their books together. On my first book which came out last year, I was amazed that they even used the sort of font that I'd envisaged!

And of course, I'm already writing on my next book - and the one after that. I thought I'd finished the next one... it was sitting on my desk, waiting for me to pack it up and send it off and then... WHAM! A chance browse in a book and I realised I'd missed something really important.

Now maybe some people would say 'Sod it' and just send the manuscript off, but not me. In a book of about 300 pages I'm not going to settle for anything less than my best. So I had to bin the printed text and go back to the original manuscript and rewrite. But I tell myself it'll all be worth it in the end.

I had something rather similar with this present book (the one on plants.) It grew so large and unwieldy that eventually I decided to go back and rewrite it in order to lose 12,000 words. Even so, the finished book has weighed in at over 400 pages!

If you're going to write a book, demand the best from yourself. You deserve it!