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?

Soundcheck (Skull and Roses)

It's pouring, pissing down all over New York with a miserable winter rain. Not quite three in the afternoon, and it's already dark, neon and taxi headlights streaking across oil-splashed streets outside the Manhattan Centre.

I flap my backstage pass at the guard and run for the warmth and dryness of the lobby. A roadie nods, busy; onstage, guitars and bass sit cradled in their stands.

Behind the two sets of drums, Bill and Mickey are taking a break. I slide off my sodden coat.

And the perfectly meshed downbeats of one solid drummer and one worldclass percussionist light up the empty hall.

As we pull into the lot the sound insinuates into the car. We get out and it surrounds us, pulls us in. We walk for long minutes, passing rows of cars. There are dozens of people walking, in straggling groups, in clumps, singly, all moving toward where the sound is coming from. We reach the end of the grass, the edge of a sharp drop and look down on the dancing ground. At one end sits the circle, a stick in every other hand, and one tenor voice rising in insistent plaint to the relentless beat of the drum.