From my point of view, this has been one of the most useful threads ever--Between JimmyT and Jerry, there is enough information on the nuts and bolts aspect of creating this music to sit down and actually do it!

Over the years I've done music teaching, playing, writing, and arranging of a lot of different styles of music(mostly the stuff people hear listen to), so I've done lots of research in trying to figure out how to put it together--I can tell you from my own experience that that info is very hard to come by--the music theory books tell you how to analyze stuff, not how to write it, and avoid anything popular anyway--the folks who write about popular music genres generally aren't musicians, and the people who perform generally aren't big on writing about what they do--

So Peter, the answers to your question are here--or at least enough to figure out what you need--