"...I'm a blunt no-screwing-around guy. There was a time I would have grabbed you by the shirt and thrown you against the wall. These are kinder gentler days. I'm lowering my cholesterol, eating right and exercising."

"Good job."

"Thanks." Bad cop sets his feet up on the desk. "To tell you the truth I've always felt my job was to talk people out of their intelligence. A guy kills a woman out of hatred, spite or whatever. I've gotta ask him or convince him to tell us what happened. The guy has a good chance of getting away with it and I have to trip him up."
- Excerpt from If Kisses Were Bullets...

What The Book Is About

There’s no good way to explain what this book is about.  The main character struggles against the aimless supervision of parents, adults, authority, expectations and the future.  He’s what some might label generation y, a twixer or a child of the baby boomer generation.  Beyond his struggles are his achievements, romance and death.  This isn’t a murder mystery but it has one.  It’s not a romance but there is some.  It’s not a coming of age story but everyone grows up.  The intro explains it best.

Excerpt from the introduction:

These things happen and happened.  Don’t get disheartened.  You are about to get very confused-as much as the main character does.  There may be places in the story where you don’t know what is going on.  This book was purposely written with pace, word choice, layout and design in mind.  The best suggestion is to continue forward.  You can always read it again and, in fact, you’ll have to.
There are two ways to read this book.  The first is to read part one (the text on the left side of the book, denoted by font) then go back to the beginning and read part two (the text on the right side of the book).
This would be the linear way to proceed.
The second way is to read part one and part two simultaneously as if reading two stories at once.  Moving forward thusly will provide you more insight into the events as they play out.  This would be the philosophical/analytical way to proceed.
Re-reading the book may reveal something new.  Feel free to go back and try again.  It’s up to you.

If Kisses Were Bullets... works its way through the history of the main character. We read from his perspective as love and life cut him short. Like the police and everyone around him we wonder if there was something in his past that could have created a brutal serial killer or was he in the wrong place at the wrong time or are his paranoid delusions real and he's being set up?

Like in real life you may never discover who did it. Or can you?

How The Book Came To Exist

If Kisses Were Bullets... is the culmination of efforts by H.X Sin the owners of Middle Muse. While the novel itself took several years to write getting it published took as long. It was Middle Muse who came to the rescue with the idea of supporting quality writers who had created books that would be hard to get published by big publishers due to difficult marketability. So Middle Mused created a division with that idea in mind using If Kisses Were Bullets... as their flagship novel.

The rough road is still not over as both H.X. and Middle Muse discovered that they would be playing and competing in the big publishers world. Things like editing, layout and cover design that larger companies could do in days became month long process with the minimal Middle Muse staff. They also learned that getting reviews to read the book, newspapers to notice it or book stores to put it on their shelves is a challenge with so many people producing books and battling to get the best coverage. Even still Middle Muse and H.X. remain hopeful knowing that If Kisses Were Bullets.. and the ideas behind it can carry them through. All they need is a little help from their friends and hopefully their fans.