Samantha Keel - Blood on the Page Volume One: A Writers Compendium of Injuries

Hey there! I'm Samantha Keel. Welcome to Blood on the Page.

This book is a companion book to Maim Your Characters: How Injuries Work in Stories. While you can read each without the other, they're like peanut butter and jelly, cake and punch, cider and rum: they go together. Each is nice on its own, but put them together and they're more than the sum of their parts.

Maim Your Charactersexists to help you decide howto use injuries in stories.

Blood on the Pageis here to help you decide what injuries to use.

The research around injuries and their treatments can be stupendously challenging, because a lot of the elements are circular. We need to pick injuries based on how they affect characters, but without researching each of the injuries we might choose, we don't quite know how it will affect our characters! Aarrgh!

I get it. I'm on your side.

I'm here to help.

As a paramedic with a decade of experience, I've got a really good handle on what is and isn't a likely consequence of a given injury. I've got some injuries that are greatfor authors. I've got more that are less likely, but might fit into your story after all, writers are the regents of the unlikely.

The point of this book is to take the guesswork out of injuring your characters. It's not the be-all and end-all of medical care by any stretch of the imagination. Each entry is designed to get you as far down the track as I can, and to that end Ive tried to include as many details as I can: the sensations, the tests, the slang, the consequences.

That said, it's not perfect. It can't be. If I wanted to elaborate on every single detail of how a particular wound affects someone's life, I would have to write a book for each and every one of these.

It would also miss the point.

The point of this book is to give you the tools you need to go out and apply an injury plot to a character without worrying overmuch about realism. It's to give you the background information necessary to put aside your cares in the realm of realism and just write.

In short: Ive done the research so you don't have to. Each entry in this book will help you with the most common and straightforward versions of its topic.