The Walking Wounded

My heroes (and heroines) often end up in physical fights.

They tend to get bruised and battered, shot, stabbed…you name it.

I'm sure many of us have the same scenarios, and usually our characters walk away and recover quickly.

Well…sporting several bruises, scrapes and whatnot right now…it takes time to heal.

Rope burns hurt, I tell you. And if you submerge them in hot water, they burn like the fires of hell.

In case you wonder why I have rope burns…

That's why. The farrier has been, and Oscuro decided to put up a serious fight rather than have shoes put on his back hooves.

He reared and ripped loose so hard, he fell over. Since I didn't want that to happen again, I hung on to the rope…big mistake.

Especially if you're not wearing gloves.

Yep, rope burn is nasty. So are the half dozen bruises I have now. And the scrape on my forearm where he decided to slam me into the wall.

The spot on my cheekbone where he clipped me with his head ten days ago…is still ouchie. (I saw stars when he caught me with his noggin on the cheek…)

It got me to thinking about what I put my characters through. No, none of it is realistic. Yeah, some are shifters and heal fast. Others are mythical creatures and heal fast.

But this healing process hurts and I often forget that.

The same goes for illnesses. It took me weeks to get over pneumonia, yet somewhere in a story my heroine gets over it in less than three days.

But most of all, I realized, none of them bear any emotional / mental scars from being shot, stabbed or otherwise attacked and injured.

And I find this same phenomena in many books I read.

Of course, I won't be having some hero bedbound for several weeks after he's been shot. It would be realistic, but it would also be a non story.

But the fact is, we all need to show a little more of the inner pain, along with the healing pain — rather than just the initial injury pain.

It's all part of a process, and as authors we tend to forget (or the lucky ones don't know) the pain of healing. So we often forget to put it in our books.