Sunday. A mega-ton of household jobs seem to have stacked up behind me. I wondered to myself whether Alice Cooper has household jobs stacking up behind him, but probably not because he never seems to be home. Being as he's on the road so relentlessly, maybe he has a housekeeper to take care of all the things that shouldn't really need taking care of because he's never there.

Anyway, I did them and figured I might just bomb out in the sofa before I go in for Round Two in front of The Typewriter Machine. I got to Channel 78,663 and there was nothing on - though I guess if I had gone back to the start, there would be different shows on to when I first begun. Instead, I decided to revisit something that used to make me happy beyond belief and I dropped on the Laurel and Hardy movie, Swiss Miss.

So far as I recall, they used to be a lot funnier than this. When the hell did Laurel and Hardy become unfunny? That's like asking when Aerosmith stopped being a giant killer of a band (except I know the answer to that: 1979). What can possibly have happened in the years since I used to roll around until my stomach hurt, that had me sit in front of the TV waiting for the movie to take over my nervous system?

Maybe they did get unfunny. Maybe it just wore off. Maybe comedy got sophisticated to a point that I can no longer go back to a more innocent time.

Or maybe I just got to be miserable - except I'm not. I was really game for it. Pensive, even.

Thats a real sad state of affairs. I'll try a few shorts from them across the week and so how they pan out, and if that doesn't work, I'll hunt down some Harold Lloyd movies and back them up with a couple from Will Hay just to be sure.

If none of those work either, I'm officially broken.

I don't tend to admire many writers these days but Karl Ove Knausgård is a huge exception for me. The world has dubbed him a literary sensation over the last few years but you know what... I suspect it could have equally gone the other way for him and he would still have carried on writing whatever he wanted. I not only like his books but I also like the way he puts himself across in interviews - which is just as honest as his novels.

This week there's a neat documentary on iPlayer in which Knausgård interviews/gets interviewed by neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh. If you're feeling cultural, it worth your time for a whole number of reasons.

But then you must go read at least the first ten pages of A Death In The Family. After that, you'll know if you're in the mood for thousands of pages of autobiographical revelation from the man. It's pretty addictive. There's also an extract here at The Vice.

Anyway, you have been warned.

Later this same day, this Great Dane came up for adoption. Sigh... what to do?

Not sure somebody else would be very impressed with a new house-mate though...

Finally today - this probably sums up more than any of us writers would care to admit and did make me laugh.

Check Grant Snider out on twitter **@grantdraws**

I think I'm on a roll.

I've decided to create some er... how shall we put it? Broadcast-able material. Some run-throughs I've been running up so far indicate that it will take the format of a radio show. There will be some music, there'll be some chat and... well, what else could there be? I guess the chat may not only be mine but that's generally the sum total of the contents of a radio show, right?

Anyway, a working title for it right now is The Dope Show. Estimated time of completion? I have no idea but I'm working on it.

•••

Long time visitors will likely recognise this:

I wrote The Language Of Thieves & Vagabonds a fair while back and released it initially in a low-key short run and also unleashed it for the kindle, but when my stocks of the softback ran out, I killed it off. With things being different now and Bad Hare being around, I decided to make it available again. The cover's been redesigned to sit comfortably with all the others and it's available now - here - in a new softback format where you'll also find whatever else I have to say about it...

...and doing this has made me feel a lot less like a lame-ass than I did yesterday and that's always a good thing.

•••

Yesterday, I found I needed something new to read. I was supposed to be in a period of enforced non-reading in order to write, but this was not to be. An hour in the bookstore revealed nothing of any value to my trained eye, which is a crying shame. Nothing but all the books I had seen before Christmas and a whole bunch of books on dieting... a situation which obviously calls for drastic measures.

Rummaging around in the memory for books I had promised myself I would read but had subsequently forgotten about, I trawled the notebooks until I re-discovered the notes I had made on Karl Ove Knausgård until I found what I was looking for and went back out to find a copy of 'A Death in the Family', the first book in his autobiographical sequence 'My Struggle', which for obvious reasons gathered more than its fair share of attention when it was first released.

It's been kind of busy around here but I've read the first few pages and once I've moved a few things out of the way, I'm going to sink my heart and soul into this because it appears to deserve it. It's been a while since I've been excited about a book that's not mine.

An added bonus in this, is that Knausgård looks like this:

He looks like a writer who writes - not a writer that spends time worrying about things that don't matter. I believe at some point in time, he said: "I'd rather write than be happy."

I can relate to that. (My version of the same ideal went like this: "Now I've broken all my toys, words are all I have left to play with," but I think I prefer his).

Go look for yourself. I think you might like him.

•••

Lot's more to tell but I must wait for things behind the scenes to kick in before I reveal the chocolate.

Have a beautiful day pretty people...