Love, Bullets, and Revisiting a Work You’ve Already Published

Some tips for when you get a second chance at revising.

It’s not often you get a chance to revise your book after it’s been published.

What would you do with that opportunity? It’d be tempting to launch a down-to-the-studs revamp — a line-by-line edit, tweaking and deleting and improving everything you found deficient the first time around. But you might not have the time or energy. You might fear that, if you do too much, you’ll strip away whatever made the book work the first time around.

Such was my thought process with “Love & Bullets,” a crime novel that began its complicated life as three novellas (“A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps,” “Slaughterhouse Blues,” and “Main Bad Guy”) published over three years by indie crime label Shotgun Honey.

In 2020, the novellas were translated and bound into one edition by Suhrkamp Verlag, a German publisher. The translated “Love & Bullets” sold far more copies than it did as three English-language novellas. Inspired by those sales, Shotgun Honey decided to re-release “Love & Bullets” in English as a single-volume work — which gave me a rare shot at a re-do (provided I could do it within a relatively limited period of time).