Characters without character flaws and scars tend to be boring — the Mary Sues of literature, there not to drive the action but to be acted upon. I try not to write them, but that means I do spend a lot of time thinking about the emotional and psychological wounds that make my characters more than two-dimensional.

 In this week’s WIP Wednesday, I’m inviting you to post excerpts from your current work-in-progress that talk about a character’s wounds: physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual; obvious or hidden.

My piece is from The Beast Next Door, my novella for the Bluestocking Belles’ Valentine box set. My hero bears both internal and internal scars.

How beautiful she had grown. The men of Bath must all be married or blind. Her wide blue eyes narrowed, and then she smiled and held her hands up as if she would fetch him down through the window.“Eric? Eric, is it really you?”

Ugo gave an amiable bark and wagged his tail, then collapsed onto the grass at Charis’s feet. She frowned again,looking from the dog to its master. “He is yours? Oh, but he has been here for weeks. Eric, have you been hiding from me?”

“I did not want to scare you, Charis. I never thought you would know me right away. But wait, I will come down.” No flinch. No fixing her eyes and then turning them away. It was as if the disfigured side of his face was no different than the side that bore a single long scar from a knife cut.

“Of course, I knew you,” she greeted him when he rounded the folly and approached the bench. “No one has eyes like yours, Eric. And no one calls me Charis except you. Here!” She backed to sit again on the bench, sweeping her gown to one side and patting the place beside her. “Come and sit with me and tell me everything you’ve done since last we could write. Oh, Eric, when Nanny died, I felt as if I had lost you both, and I can only imagine how you must have felt so far away from home! I am so sorry.”

Eric hesitated. Given a choice, he’d have sat on the other side, so she didn’t have to look at the mess the surgeons had made. Charis put her head to one side, her smile slipping a little, and he sat quickly before he made her uncertain of her welcome.

“I thought it was worse for you,” he told her, “stuck here and no one knowing or caring how important she was to us both.”