every day should be a susie day

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).

Not as much fun as adventures with CSS, I’d reckon.

Or indeed the Go! Team, who I saw this week and are still so. much. fun live. It’s like being in an unusually kawaii school assembly run by Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem: all splitting the crowd down the middle for a singalong and prescribing the appropriate timing of one’s pogo. Gig was much enhanced by the doorman asking me for ID (and being hilariously floored when I told him my age), a bloke on the way out telling me I had ‘the best hair I’ve seen in ages. Well, six months’, and a random after-gig club with a playlist from Grandmaster Flash to the theme from Neighbours. Anyway, here’s Ladyflash for the uninitiated.

An interesting piece in the Times about how internet nerds are all girls these days, except in the world of programming. I’m depressed by the 12-year-old who thinks that girls only like the communicative fun bits and should leave the techie business to the boys (especially the day after International Women’s Day): maybe our schools need to be wallpapered again with the IT equivalent of those cheerfully grimy girls in boiler suits waving spanners to encourage us to become mechanics. (And let’s ignore the fact that I’ve been living up to my gender stereotype all weekend, harassing WordPress templates into minimal degrees of submission and wishing it was all laid out a bit more visually.) Then again, is content really a lesser species than code? Web 2.0 isn’t just about the back end being Open Source so we can fiddle with it: it’s about simple elegant interfaces which let you get on with writing. Bet that 12-year-old grows up to be a journalist…

Not a lot of B&L writing due to the aforementioned WordPress harassment (more on that soon, once there’s anything worth looking at), and scribbling some Big Woo promotional material. Imminent publication: it’s like having a proper job or something.

Watching Wales v Ireland and actually getting a bit teary (I am so proud of the boys, bless them, and now I’ve heard about the gouging I feel less cross about us earning 2 sin bins); finding out that someone very lovely is getting married, hurrah; eating pearl barley; moaning about Ashes to Ashes Alex Drake’s bra strap.

I’m officially novelisting as the day job: hurrah! No more guided tours from me.

It was time to stop: I was starting to sound like Mark Gatiss doing the Stumphole Cavern sketch every time I talked about ceiling bosses. But I will miss being asked about architecture and history and where the toilets are, and quite often knowing the answers. I’ll miss the little ripple of laughter I always got from the obligatory Shakespeare anecdote. Above all I’ll miss being able to call this ‘the office’:

Kiddie deathlit: like buses, apparently. Second of the ‘three came along at once’ is Jenny Downham’s Before I Die (YA, hardback). Like Sam in Ways to Live Forever, Tessa has a list of things to achieve before her terminal illness wins – but Tessa is 16, so we’re into sex, drugs, rock and roll territory. There’s something mournfully pedestrian about Tessa’s list, and about her life in general, however extraordinary her circumstances: she’s an unflinchingly horrible teenage girl, whose real tragedy is that she’ll never live long enough to grow into the gentler, more interesting woman lurking beneath. Just as unflinching is her best friend, Zoey, retained because she’s the only girl in school selfish enough to ignore Tessa’s illness, yet utterly destructive to be around as a result (until she undergoes her own emotional renaissance). The prose is striking, recalling most the powerful simplicity of Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Sadly towards the close, it becomes overlong and repetitive, with an infuriatingly self-indulgent fifty pages at the end that makes you long, guiltily, for the inevitable. But it’s a memorable, if gruelling, read. I’d have some chocolate on standby if I were you.

Next up, The Bower Bird, about, er, a girl with a terminal illness. Then again, I did receive a certain adventure story with a glowing neon orange slipcover from Amazon just this morning…

Advice on how to not be daft online, for the endpages of Big Woo. Did you know that the internet is a train full of spidermonkey enthusiasts? No, I have no idea either.

Being a domestic goddess (minus the hoovering), gossiping wildly with my now-ex work colleagues, watching Primeval even though it’s awful, failing to go to the cinema.