Nah. Someone who leaves the army because of a sprain looks like a sissy. I like the "infected wound from imprecise removal of a musket ball' idea much better.

The injury that makes him leave the army comes much, much later in the story, and I've already figured out the perfect battle for it to happen in. The one I'm trying to figure out currently is just a temporary thing to get him alone with the heroine for long enough that something can happen between them.

Sorry, Susan -- I misread. I think either injury could work in that case, depending on the circumstances around it.

I think it's funny that I was all proud of writing something with no disability in it(and I did for the last two, but now I'm back home among the maim stories again.) Heh. And I almost typed "huh?" Kay will not be happy till she gives me that habit, huh?

Concussion, sans vomiting?

Heh. I used to be on a (pro) editors' list and someone was looking around for pointers on blood spatter patterns for a project she was editing. A year or so later, I happened across a veeery familiar sounding scene - it turned out that the project this editor was working on was some juicy Krycek slash. I fired off an email to the editor to be sure, and we had a good laugh about the overlapping circles of the internet.

An aquaintace of mine is a forensic policewoman. She often gives lectures to writers at cons, like Baycon, on blood spatters and other detailed things. Complete with slides. Fun to watch the newbies pale and leave the room.

Cool. But then I would be complete unsufferable to watch most crime TV with...instead of just mostly.(I've already started to drive Mom crazy with "Oh, look, they found the murder weapon again!" in re L&O because David Simon says in his book irl, you find the weapon like 35% of the time. Any second, she's gonna ask me if David Simon jumped off a bridge would I but mostly she tells me "Just watch the show!")

erika, have you see the book "Scene of the Crime" from the Writer's Digest series of writer's guides? I've raved over this book before, it talks about what bodies do when left to their own devices for several days, how to search for evidence, and how to handle it after the fact to make sure the defense attorney doesn't have a cakewalk in disproving all of it.

I've heard about it but haven't read one. I should.Coming in here to show my new, fannish tag. I've written a lot of stuff, but that one scene is all anyone asks about.Sometimes, in life a woman needs her friends to tell her no. Please tell me not to waste my time on a crossover between SVU and Sex And The City, played for laughs. Same city, after all...even if one is shiny!happyNY and the other is lonely!shitholeNY where if you're lucky they smell the body in three days...it'd be almost worth it for a Samantha/Munch meet and grope...er, greet.

One of the best bits in "Scene of the Crime" is the description of the discovery of a body behind a rundown house. The smell eventually attracted enough attention to bring the cops and, according to the author, "The coroner was declaring the victim dead from a block away."

Non-fiction is often a great deal more fun to read than fiction. The real world has a better imagination than anyone else gets credit for.