Well, the spell set is geared more towards damage. You get some cc spells, but not as good as a bard, and you get the option of a handful of buffs, but not as good as a wizard. So one decision you will need to make is what balance of damage spells versus buffs/cc. You also need to decide what metamagic feats to take. If you want to do damage, you will need maximise and empower, enlarge is useful for pking beholders at a distance, and extend is only useful if you're going to make buffing an important part of your sorc. You get loads more sp than other classes, but it balances out if you leave maximise on all the time (as I do).
Many of your spells have difficulty checks to overcome to be successful - your charmisma modifier is added to the dice roll, so high charisma is very useful, not just for the piddling amount of extra sp it gives.
Consider the Force of Personality feat. It will let you get your will saves from charisma, so you can use Wis as a dump stat and still get ok will saves.
I gave Surli a level of bard. Bards get to wear light armour, but importantly they don't get an arcane spell penalty for doing so. Bards also get to use all healing wands with no umd check - some of the later wands need quite high umd, and a healing wand that only works 80% of the time is guaranteed to fail whenever you need it most.
Pure sorcs get double sp from items. With multiclass you get a 1.0+(S/T) multiplier on items, where T is your total number of levels and S is the number of sorc levels. So at low levels, one level of bard will have quite an impact. By level 16, it's pretty negligible: 6 or 7 sp off a magi item. Sorcs also get more sp per level than other classes, but again, one level of bard is minor at level 16.
For low-level spells, don't bother with burning hands - it's useless. Take magic missile and at least one close-quarters spell like chill touch or shocking grasp. The latter splits oozes and things are often immune; the former has no save (!! very unusual) but is useless against undead. Niacs is a tougher choice - it starts off quite useful, but the saves really start to hurt after a few levels. You end up casting 5 in a row and feeling lucky if one hits. Of course, you can always take it to begin with then pay a trainer later to swap your spells.
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