And if he's afraid he's embarrassed himself in the eyes of his fellow officers, it'll make him all the more eager to court a superior officer's pretty, rich cousin. I like this.

How do you decide who to kill?(Because, ok, it's noir. Somebody's ticket's getting punched. ) But I can't decide if it should be Mysterious Rich Hottie Client's Sister or if someone should die in the quest to protect MRHCS and she's in more of a "Can they save her before it's too late?" kind of deal. Most of my fiction doesn't go in for killing...except with sharp words.

erika, it depends. How annoying is the sister, how vital is she to the continued happiness of the hottie brother?

Hmm. In my work I mostly kill people just to streamline the plot and get them out of the way (and, boy, is it easy to do in the late 18th and early 19th centuries--French bullets and consumption and childbed fever, oh my!). But I think you want to go for the most important person dying that you can make the rest of the story work without. IOW, kill the sister if you can, IMO.

I could, defintely...there are still many ways to take a person out in this century.

Yep. The beauty of the past for a death-minded writer is it's just so easy to kill people young without necessarily resorting to violence.

No shit. If I ended up choosing death for the sister, it'd be a blunt-force trauma, as she's survived a difficult birth and a car accident that killed her husband already, and, to quote a perp on Homicide who tried to hit the same woman twice "the bitch just won't die."

How do you decide who to kill?

Basically, what Susan said. Whose death will hurt the most (the characters and the reader) without deep-sixing the plot?

Or you know, the Minears and Lehanes of the world that cap everyone.. (lightbulb) Oh, like Big Pussy on the Sopranos...he died and we're all still sad about it. Even Tony is, and he handled that bit of business personally. And we knew and liked him for the most part so that's why he's a good rat and a good corpse.

Drums drabble:

Left…Left…Left-Right-Left

The annual 4th of July parade, and I’m marching right behind the drummers. When we get to Main Street we’ll play, but for now we’re silent but for the “boom, boom, boom” of the bass drum marking time. My left foot hits the ground exactly timed with each beat. Five years in band and I can’t NOT fall into step with a drumline.

The eighth grader playing bass drum isn’t marching. He’s just walking. His feet are completely divorced from the metronome beat his arm plays. I don’t know whether I’m more impressed or appalled. How can you hear a drumbeat, much less MAKE one, and not have it take over?