Well, I’m happy to report a other hurdle completed to publishing my third book, The Outlander War. Over the Christmas and New Year’s holiday, I received the proof from my publisher to review. During that time, I spent my holiday vacation reviewing their edits, commenting on questions raised within my novel, and even suggested a few changes and edits myself. I find that reading it over for the hundredth time, and you still see different ways to tell the story.

The hard part is not over editing. You have to watch how much you change because it might affect the overall quality. I think, as a writer, we are consistently not satisfied with our work, and would continue to edit unless we stop ourselves. It’s the nature of the beast.

The biggest difference for me has been working with a publisher, Austin Macauley, in Great Britain. They use traditional, Old English, for certain words like honour, defence, realise, and artefact for example. It’s not a big deal, to me. The words still have the same meaning so it’s okay.

In fact, the one thing I will say is they gave me the best edit on one of my novels to date. It was clear, concise, and thoughtful. The biggest issue we had was on the term shield maiden. I had it capitalized throughout my novel, treating it as a proper name, but they thought that was excessive and should not be treated as such. In the end, we compromised. I made it lowercase in general references and capitalized it in titles.

Now I’m just waiting for the finished product, to see the final proof of everything together. This is the end of a journey that began more than 20 years ago. The story behind Forever Avalon has been incredible fun, any its not over yet. The first trilogy of this series may be complete, but the story goes on. More to follow as I get closer to its release. Thank you for all your support.

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Mark Piggott is the author of the Forever Avalon book series. Forever Avalon is available for purchase as a paperback/ebook at Amazon. The Dark Tides is available for purchase as a paperback/ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iUniverse Publishing. The Outlander War, Book Three of the Forever Avalon series is coming soon from Austin Macauley Publishing.