Music

From Warren Ellis, because in the most recent Bad Signal he said it so much better than I can:

Funny how I've come to associate music with the dark. The music that affects me most, anyway. It's half-three in the morning, it's dark and cold; and I mean cold, cold for the first time in months, like someone flicked a switch and winter's here. And suddenly everything coming out of Winamp is taking me back ten, fifteen,
pushing twenty years. Suddenly everything's turned back into the soundtrack to a dozen love affairs and the moments that your mind makes widescreen. Eight bars of something and you can see that girl dancing, you can see that girl waiting for you in the square at eight with the pigeons launching away from her, you can see that girl walking towards you and you can see the first time that girl smiled at you and meant it. And... I dunno. This is a cold country. Night comes quickly.

There's a club I'd go to where they played old-fashioned r&b music, a basement club, and we'd crawl up the stairs in need of a cigarette and some air, and when you opened the door this great column of steam would burst out and rush up into the night, visible from streets away... me and Sheelagh Baxter, sitting on the pavement
and just watching it jump up at the stars.

Winter music. Comes out of the dark and just pokes at your heart a bit.

Writing

Help! Does this sentence deserve to die? Its life rests in your hands. So speak up!

The young man's voice sobbed with pain, but his face remained an impassive audience.

Is it intrusive? Is it stupid? I can't decide! For more context:

"I just got married; I have only a small herd, and he killed them all." The young man's voice sobbed with pain, but his face remained an impassive audience. Saul boosted him onto the back of the bay stallion, then clambered aboard himself, carefully balancing Amadou behind him. He wrapped the man's arms around his own waist, gripping his wrists firmly to keep him from falling off the back of the horse. "One of my friends thought to stop this man." The back of Saul's shirt began to seep blood against his skin. "The man shot him dead." Saul clapped his heels hard against the sides of the stallion, forcing the horse to a gallop.

Help.