Good gracious, 'The Craft of Musical Composition: Book 2' by Hindemith has achingly specific instructions on what exactly to do within melody-crafting. Frankly @nickgreenberg, I'm impressed that you can recommend a book like this. I'm just trying to craft a system that won't get me booed off the dance floor. Thank you, I've ordered a copy and I'll see what I can make of it.
-- CardiacTasty
Another oldie but a goodie: Helmholtz's "On the Sensation of Tone". One of the first scientific works to deal with things such as timbre, reverberation decay, and on and on, approached from a not-quite-so-theory-packed perspective. And I can't recommend Nicolas Slonimsky's "Thesaurus" enough...just randomly flipping through it and choosing a scale at random can be a great way to approach the initial compositional steps.