Why I Rewrote THE ASSASSIN

Earlier this week, my first book in three years finally came out. And She Runs is available in Kindle Unlimited, on the Kindle Store or you can purchase a paperback copy. But if you’ve looked at the book or saw the announcement about what the book is about, it might sounds a little familiar.

That’s because it’s a rewrite of my debut novel, The Assassin.

And She Runs came out ten years (almost to the day) that The Assassin came out and and that was intentional. Cassie Morgan is the most important character in my life. Maybe even one of the most important people in my life. She’s the character that is most like me in the ways I think and process the world, or was when I was twenty-two, back when The Assassin came out.

Rewriting a book you published a decade ago, and I mean rewriting it from the ground up, is a little insane. But I had lots of reasons to do it.

The biggest one – she deserved the story.

(spoilers ahead)

The very first edition of Cassie’s story happened when I was thirteen (and I’m thirty-one now, fun little inverse of numbers). I had no idea what I was doing. She was a teenager, she was the Assassin and her adoptive father was kidnapped, leaving her to find him and find her biological father.

Clearly unreasonable, but I was a child, as was she. Every time I had to rewrite and refigure out the details of her story, a young woman going face-to-face with a serial killer, there were new layers to figure out. The first time I wrote Cassie’s story, when she was a teenager, Connor Anders didn’t come around until the third book. 

Every time I rewrote and retooled her story, to get it right, too, she and I were always the same age, trying to figure out the same life moments. When The Assassin came out in 2015, I knew how the series was going to end, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there in some aspects. Actually in quite a few aspects and I think when it came time for Justice and Lies to come out, I realized that the first book had a lot of holes in it. I knew at some point, I’d have to go back and really clean that book up, but the plan had been to do so after I finished the series with Hit List, the fourth book. 

But about two years ago, I made a bad mistake and checked my amazon reviews. A random stranger had left a review on there that was critical, and that’s fine, my own roommate thinks Cassie in The Assassin is a bitch. Not every book is for every person, and that’s the great thing about stories. There’s a story for everyone, but not every story is for everyone. 

The problem with this review is that it mentioned all the insecurities I had with The Assassin and it made it clear that if I wanted Cassie’s story to be my main series that I promote for a long time, I needed to fix the story sooner rather than later. 

So in February last year, I took on an insane task. I decided I needed to rewrite The Assassin. Originally, I thought it would just be adding and updating it. But as I read through the book, it was clear that just going through it was not going to cut it.

So I rewrote the book. Completely rewrote it, there are parts that are the same, like the main plot lines, but this book, And She Runs, is 35,000 words longer than The Assassin. that’s like 100 plus extra pages. New characters, an extra plot line, but still the things that made The Assassin the book it was.

And She Runs is just the bigger and better version. I hope you enjoy it.