The Assassin's Prayer Revised Edition Now Available

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I can hear it now (because some have already asked)—a revised edition of a 3 year-old book? Why bother? Surely you could find something better to do with your time, like clean the fish tank or organize your sock drawer.

Traditional wisdom tells authors to never look back, to release their novels into the wild and move on to the next one. Traditional wisdom says tinkering with a previously-published manuscript wastes time better served working on a new project. And traditional wisdom is right … except when it’s not.

Simply put, this was an itch I had to scratch, an itch that kept me from giving new projects my full attention. Until I went back and revisited/revised The Assassin’s Prayer, I wouldn’t be able to really buckle down on a new book. (Or books, actually—Warlock #1: Autofire Blitz and Chunks of Hell: A Horror Anthology. But we’ll talk about those at another time.)

Call me a perfectionist (not that my novel, or anyone’s novel for that matter, is perfect) or accuse me of OCD—I won’t deny either charge—but the fact that I knew I could improve The Assassin’s Prayer gnawed at me. Sure, the book sold like weed at Woodstock when it was first released, but reader feedback and reviews made it clear there were some issues that could easily be remedied with some tidying up of the narrative. It wouldn’t take much effort to make the book better, so why not do so?

Make no mistake, we’re not talking a major overhaul here. For example, a decent chunk of readers dislike, despise, or downright loathe the ending of the novel, but I refuse to change that, even though doing so would probably make the book more commercially viable. (That either makes me a stubborn fool or a damn fool …you decide.)

No, pretty much all I did was trim some of the melancholy fat from my main character’s—Travis Kain—angst. You see, when I set out to write The Assassin’s Prayer, I was determined to give Kain greater emotional depth than the typical action hero (or in this case, antihero), so he’s a bit of a grumpy bastard with more than his fair share of baggage. As some reviewers noted, (in the original version) Kain spent too much time crying in his whiskey.

In this revised edition, those kind of “emo assassin” (to borrow a phrase from my buddy Jack Badelaire) scenes have been scaled back. What used to be a paragraph of internal torment is now just a sentence or two. The story moves faster and Kain—while hardly a sunshine and roses kind of guy—is less sullen and morose. Heck, I think I even let him crack a joke or two this time.

Listen, despite a streamlined narrative and a spiffy new cover, I don’t expect sales to skyrocket, but that’s not why I revamped the book. I revamped it for me, to exorcise that whiny, nagging voice in the back of my brain that kept whispering, “You can make it better.” Because sometimes the only way to make your demons shut the hell up is to do what they tell you.