Hi friends! I’m really excited to welcome Eileen Dreyer back to ALBTALBS, and she’s got an excellent post. It ties into one I posted last week, written a long time ago about some pitfalls in romantic suspense. Eileen made a comment on FB a while back about what she says below and I was like “omg yes exactly!” Then I asked if she’d be willing to write a guest post about it, and here we are! 😀 Enjoy!

Don’t Shoot Him In The Shoulder

This blog began the way a lot of conversations do around the bar at writers’ conferences. Somebody read a book in which the hero got shot and immediately rogered the daylights out of the heroine.

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Where’d he get shot?” I ask.

“Well, only in the shoulder….”

Ah, yes. The good old shoulder shot. On the screen everyone from Wild Bill Hickock to James Bond has shaken off the annoyance of a bullet in the shoulder as he saved the day. I mean, it’s a great place to shoot a hero (or heroine), isn’t it? There aren’t any major organs to worry about. Nothing but connective tissue.

Wrong. Besides the lungs, which have an annoying habit of getting in the way by expanding when we breathe, major blood vessels like the subclavian and brachial arteries run across the impact zone along with the brachial nerve, which impacts the entire arm. And that doesn’t even take into account the bones, from the easily fragmented collarbone (clavicle) to the humerus. Continue reading →