In traditional fashion, I have spent the Bank Holiday doing DIY.  Specifically, decorating the kitchen.

That’s what happens when you burrow in the cupboard for chick peas, and find the turmeric instead.  If I was a C15th spice merchant, I’d be well narked.  As it is, I’m quite impressed by my artistic jar-juggling skills.  I’m calling it Sunset Boulevard: Kitchen, and leaving it there for future generations to appreciate.  Or until I find my dustpan and brush.

 I’m slacking on the fiction front – always tricky when you’re knee deep in your own book to fully pay attention to someone else’s – so you’ll have to wait for my review of the marvellous Sarah Mussi’s new teen issue-thriller, Last of the Warrior Kings.   (It is killing me to keep putting it down, though.  Damn you, Mussi, and your cliffhangery ways!)  In the meantime, here’s Charlie Brooker talking about existentialism.  He’s always good value, but this column has bonus thought-provocation in with the LOLs.  It’s what Biscuits & Lies is about, really: becoming so accustomed to the rules of the unreal world (telly, movies, the internet, where you’re a safe observer in the audience, just a pseudonym among millions of untraceable others) that you can’t help but apply them to the real one, at which point everything goes tits-up up quite spectacularly.  Speaking of which…

 You know how last week I said I kept thinking of throwing the whole of B&L out of the window?  Well, I did.  (Metaphorically.  It was in my laptop: I sort of need that a bit too much to go throwing it at windows.)  I’ve nailed the heroine’s voice, at last.  The characters I’d planned out are writing themselves into unexpected, sparkly new people.  There’s a whole new subplot, and I have no idea how it will end: I’m spotting clues to it as I type them, and giggling, and scribbling down ridiculous possibilities, because who knows?  It’s a messy, impractical way to work: I can see already the places I’ll need to tighten up, the meandering chunks of dialogue that don’t do anything for the plot, are just there because I was having fun making these people talk to each other.  (I’m writing dialogue!  I’ve missed dialogue.)  But I don’t think my brain works any other way.  I’ve got the fundamental story set in stone, but if it’s all preconstructed, I get bored.  Knowing exactly where I’m going would be like reading the last page of the detective novel to find out whodunnit: simply unsporting, old chap.  I shall deny ever saying such things when I’m sweating over Edit #43, obviously, but right now, I’m having a riot.  Can there really be people on the planet who don’t want to do this for a living?

 Doing a little spoon-based dance round the kitchen while cooking, only to realise there were three students in the garden, probably weeing themselves at my old-lady moves; celebrating 2 chocolate-free weeks with pistachio ice-cream (I fit in my jeans again: sod it); Prison Break-ing like a mo-fo (2 eps from the end of Season 2: gosh *flails* etc); finally being a grown-up and going for a proper bra-fitting, which is much less scary than I’d imagined (though I was mentally writing an extra serafina67 scene where she did the same – with hi-larious consequences, of course).