Or should that be... Old Sadie, new blog.

Had a week of not drinking, which has been not very interesting. Just trying it out really to see if I could do it. Of course the answer is "No... don't be fucking stupid!"
Rayne is looking me over with a very sarcastic expression on his face and he's got a point. However a half a bottle of wine has put me in a fairly chipper mood this evening so i can't complain. Either it says that "yes, I am a total alcoholic" or "well actually, a half a bottle of wine occasionally is actually quite good for you" i'm not entirely sure.

But anyway... I feel better for it and I'm not going to argue with that.

Also there has been lots of Placebo on the radio and this always cheers me up, in the face of miserablism about the latest fictional plague (Swine fever) and unremitting poverty. Am now thinking of ways to scramble together enough cash to escape to Europe and watch the aforementioned little Brian in action somewhere. Now that would be a fillip.

I'm hard at work on a number of projects too, which helps and although there have been a few creative issues this week, mostly involving money worries and the like, I'm back on target tonight and working on the sequel to Dark Paths and a bi-sexual space opera for a submission in the autumn (as yet untitled) so as long as the Alzheimers doesn't get any worse I'll be fine.

Wish me luck.

Because I'm feeling creative and I've missed the posting deadline to get Ch.5 up on Litty for the weekend, here's a little advance taste of things to come for our heroes. Rayne Wylde, Undead lead singer with the band Whipsnade is about to catch a plane back to London, little realising that Xavier the sexy dancer he just spent the last few days with has been captured by Cole Lagrado, an Ancient Vampire Master of the city of San Francisco. Until, that is, a messenger arrives to bring him up to speed...

(Dark Paths and the characters of Rayne Wylde and Xavier Gavrilov are the intellectual property of Sadie Rose Bermingham and Bellora Quinn. Please do not copy or redistribute without asking permission first.)

The vampire on the concourse at San Francisco International smiled at Rayne pleasantly as he approached. He did a very fine job of feigning cool nonchalance but he couldn't do anything about the aura of nervous fear he gave off. Rayne could taste it and his fangs extended automatically. The strange vamp waited until Rayne was just within striking distance before speaking.

"Mr. Lagrado wishes you farewell and safe journey, Mr. Wylde," he declared, moments before the small, angry Englishman's left hand wrapped itself around the trailing ends of the scarf tied loosely at his throat and yanked his head down to shoulder height. At the same time Rayne Wylde's right knee came up hard and connected with the softer tissues of the tall blond vampire's groin.

"Suck my dick, you cold-blooded bastard!" Rayne hissed at him as he went to his knees with an astonished groan that told the smaller Vampire that no one had treated him with quite such blatant disregard in a very long time.

Once upon a time, Rayne might have worried about that. This was no Ancient but he was older, and probably stronger. The element of surprise would not last forever so he needed to capitalise whilst his opponent was still distracted by the pain coursing through his mangled genitalia.

He crouched automatically, putting on a show of mock-concern.

"Oh my god! I am so sorry! Did I hurt you?" he exclaimed in a stagey tone designed to carry and put other passengers at their ease. He was already projecting; his thoughts telling anyone close enough to have witnessed the assault that this was really nothing for them to worry about and it would all be taken care of. Passengers bustled on around him, seemingly unconcerned that he had just attempted a non-surgical castration on the man kneeling before him. In a lower register for his victim's ears alone Rayne growled; "Where is he? Tell me now and maybe I won't strap you to the wheel of a 747 and leave you for the fuckin' carrion chasers!"

The urge - no, the all-consuming compulsion - to grab the smaller vampire and pummel him into a unrecognisable pulp was so strong that Lagrado's creature almost couldn't control it in time. He could not create that kind of spectacle in such a public place or Cole Lagrado would have his head, literally.

"Concern? How touching!" he wheezed through gritted teeth. When he moved, it was with that blinding speed all but the weakest of them were capable of, turning at the same time so the scarf came off and Rayne was left holding it, a puzzled expression briefly gracing his handsome face. Prowling around behind him the older Vampire growled softly and impatiently.

"You cross into an Ancient's territory, uninvited and unannounced. You not only hunt without permission but you mark your mate. Then you abandon your marked human in our city. You offer insult after insult and expect no retaliation?" He snorted, a very human gesture, belying that he was perhaps not all that old after all. "Be grateful Cole Lagrado's only punishment is to take the boy."

Rayne half turned, tracking him purely by the feelings of anger and frustration he emitted. His fingers remained curled around the delicate wisp of emerald and gold, still rich with the scent of Xavier's skin, his blood. Were it not for that he could have left it; if this creep had not so casually referred to Xavier like some kind of offering. He had seen too many innocents go down that route with the Old Ones and it never ended well. Soft, pale lips drew back from his extending fangs in a slight, warning snarl like a dog whose boundaries have been violated.

"I've told your boss and now I'm telling his trained monkey, I don't ask anyone's permission for anything," Rayne hissed softly. "Now if any of you creeps have hurt so much as a hair on that boy's head, I am going to break some bones. Punish me if that's what gets you hard, but leave him out of it. It's not his fault."

He shivered all the same. There was no expression on the blond's face but something in his manner, in the way he felt... it sent chills through him. Rayne was a good judge of his own kind, generally. He had a feel for the ages and skills of his fellow Undead that even his Sire, Jabez openly admired. But he had no time for them, to his Ancient Mentor's eternal frustration. It was true that Jabez also shunned most of Vampire-kind but he was over three and half thousand centuries old and it did not pay to provoke him. Plus, his mortal bodyguard Mersen was almost as lethal as a whole cadre of Undead. Any Vamp that got within a hand's distance of the Everman was doing well. Doing well, that is until Jabez Everman got hold of him!

In London these days Rayne's blood ties to the semi-mythical Everman protected him from all but the most lethal opponents. After they had combined to teach Everman's own Demonic Sire, Kal Zelarin a lesson he would spend the remainder of his Unlife regretting, they discovered they had earned a massive quotient of kudos among the British Vampire coteries. Here things were a little different. He wished now that he had paid more attention to the stuff Jabez and his human ally Dominic Warren tried to teach him about Vampires and their ways and the whole complex pecking order. It was so boring though. The Vamp politics just sent him to sleep. It was like the Royal Family only ten times more insular and with even more archaic regulations. Of course the Royals probably wouldn't rip out your lungs and eat them if you crossed them (with just one notable exception, that he knew of!)

This cocksucker at the airport had talked about him marking Xavier and he supposed that was right. It was unusual for him to leave visible bite marks on a lover and he certainly had not done so on purpose but Xavier seemed to have no problems with it. And the boy's increased sensitivity to his touch had been immensely rewarding in bed, he had to admit. It was almost as if they moved with one accord. Actually, when he thought about it like that, it was a bit creepy. He pushed the idea away and focused on Blondie, who still had not tried to rip him to quivering pieces.

Interesting.

"I don't do gratitude," he sneered at the glowering Vamp now, tempering his sharp tongue slightly. "But I'll make a tiny little allowance because I hate to put anyone's nose out of joint and I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to do that on purpose, all right? I'm a dozy Brit, we have different rules where I come from. I didn't think I was robbing from anyone's table. So I'd be very grateful if you guys would let the boy go. Okay?"

He held his hands out to his sides in an open, placatory gesture that was probably not the best defensive posture under the circumstances. But hey, he was standing in the middle of one of the world's busiest airports. This cold-blood was hardly going to eviscerate him here with so many witnesses.

"Okay?" he invited again when the other Vampire seemed to be having difficulty controlling his breathing.


The vampire's expression changed ever so slightly. As if he had been trying to peer into Rayne and now had what he wanted, but what he saw wasn't what he'd expected to see.

"You can not be that naïve," he muttered. Then he heaved a small, completely unnecessary sigh. Old habits died hard, especially for those not yet a few centuries old. "Even if it were up to me, which it's not, he can't just be let go. You marked him…"

When he saw that Rayne's expression did not change he rolled his eyes. "Don't you know anything?"

He laughed because it really was rather ironic. The huge insult Cole Lagrado had dealt this small vamp, that was barely more then a fledgling, didn't even ping his radar as an insult because he had no clue what he'd done. He was simply concerned his lover should not be hurt.

"The mark…it's a blood bond. Like saying this is mine, tagging him as your human servant or a favourite. It tells other vampires he's under your protection and not to feed from or harm him. That Lagrado has done so, and has since made him Steffen's pet, says you're no threat, your mark means nothing." He paused and chuckled humourlessly again.

Explaining the insult was just so ridiculous. The very reason he was sent, with that scarf as a message, was so that Wylde would know of the retaliation. He had no hope of winning if he challenged Lagrado, so he was supposed to get on the plane with his tail between his legs knowing he'd been effectively bitch-slapped for his insolence. Having to tell him all this took the sting out of it. Cole would be all sorts of put out if he knew.

He should stop here, the message had been delivered, and made abundantly clear. His job was done. But he couldn't resist adding; "You only have two choices, Wylde. Get on the plane and it's a draw. Or try and negotiate for your boy." With that the blond vampire moved away, leaving Rayne standing there speechless and very, very pissed off.

Rayne quivered almost imperceptibly as the words sank in. The milling airport crowds melted into mindless background noise, as irritating as the drone of insects but of no more consequence. He had eyes only for this smug, slightly incredulous creature standing in front of him, laughing at him. Fucking well laughing at him!

He could, and had, put up with a lot of shit but he saw no reason to take that one lying down. Lagrado was a serious motherfucker but this one? The singer doubted he was more than bait. Cole Lagrado wasn't going to waste serious Vamp-power just to send a message. And he'd been brought up to always reply to messages. It was only polite, after all.

"Oi, Mr Know It All!" he said coldly as the blond turned to walk off.

For a second the tall, fair-haired, show-off hesitated, and then he turned. The pause was his undoing.

Rayne was not where the messenger had left him. As he turned back again to face in the direction he had been headed, the singer appeared in front of him. He was like a wraith, moving so fast that his opponent only had the sense to take a single step back before the sharp point of the oriental ceremonial knife Rayne Wylde had been admiring when he first became aware of his shadow punched through his heart and out through his back.

It made one hell of a mess of his nice suit.

As the blond went down with a grunt of pain and surprise, Rayne Wylde said; "Tell your boss, that's just a little warning, in case I find out you've damaged what's mine. If you survive that long, anyway. If not, I'm sure he'll get the message."

He was gone before the blond could get a hand to the hilt of the katana in his chest. By the time the mesmerised travellers realised what had happened and started screaming that there was a wounded man lying on the ground in their midst, Rayne Wylde was in a taxi heading back into the city.

Dark Paths (copyright 2008: Sadie Rose Bermingham & Bellora Quinn)

To be continued... on SadieRose's page at Literotica-dot-com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/horseracing/3224795/New-Approach-bows-out-a-Champion-at-Newmarket-Horse-Racing.html

This fella has done me more good than the entire Labour cabinet and their financial rumblings this year. Enjoy your retirement, Red. Hope they send you some tasty fillies!

*genuflects*

I'm getting rapidly fed up of doing things by the book, so if the proposed goverment agency for reading everyone's e-mail, tapping their phones and generally following them around to make sure they don't do anything naughty http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4948602.ece is watching *flicks the Vs* why don't you bastards spend some money making sure that people who do things by the book and behave themselves, have enough to live on and aren't constantly worrying about whether living in this country is going to be the death of them?

I want to know why I have to work more than every hour of daylight every day of the fucking week in order to be able to afford to live in a decent (not enormous or fuck-off glamorous) little house in the area of my choosing and have basics like a (bog-standard moggie) pet and a (small, relatively economical) car. I haven't got children, thank fuck, or I really would be bankrupt by now! But how do some people manage? I can't get my head around it. I'm not earning enough to live on but I'm not currently entitled to any tax breaks either. It makes no sense. And I do a job that pays more than, say, a cleaner or a check-out operator. I'm what they call a para-professional but with a self-employed partner who's currently only making enough money to keep his business afloat and not the pair of us as well. Technically, we're exactly what the Government seems to think should be the ideal. We've never really lived beyond our means, we don't have a mortgage that we can't afford to pay back, we've no outstanding credit card debts and yet we still can't afford basics like getting the fucking car fixed/serviced or going on holiday. Christ alone knows what will happen to us once we're past retirement age!

(They'll probably have passed a law that says they can have us put down when we become a drain on society by then. )

In the meantime Gordon Brown's giving himself a big old pat on the back for being the saviour of the EMF, using my hard earned tax pounds to do it. And before that he and his predecessor were using my tax pounds to fight a fucking expensive war that I didn't actually endorse. And before that they were probably up to some other skullduggery that involved Golden Handshakes/Hellos for people who didn't fucking deserve them. And what benefit will the ordinary bod in t he street get from all this? You guessed it! (*hint: it rhymes with Duck Hall)  

So read it, Gordon! Read it and take it on board if you wonder why people get so fucking pissed off with you. It's because we feel as if we're wasting our time, earning money for someone else's benefit. We are born and then we live and then we die, to paraphrase Morrissey. Bollocks to it!

Bastard squad! Bloody Playlist has eaten Placebo's version of Daddy Cool!

You can't turn your back for a minute without some fucker taking the piss on this site. Well bollocks to it. I'll take my ball over to F**ebook if that's the way they wanna play it.

*slams the door*

Sadie Rose inc. is in celebratory mood this afternoon, in spite of being poor as an impoverished church mouse who's just discovered that her church is about to be bulldozed to make way for an orbital bypass! Not even the snuffles could detract from the joy of my favourite afternoon of the racing calendar.

Astoundingly, I've never been to Paris, but every year on the first Sunday in October my thoughts head off there and I find myself parked in front of the TV to watch the coverage of the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, Europe's premier horserace. Not even the grimness of being trapped in a Weatherbys office, deprived of daylight all day and sniffed at by people who obviously thought they were too good for me for 12 months has robbed me of my over-riding love of what they once called the sport of Kings, but is now more like the determined existence of yet another anomaly that modern society hasn't quite managed to wipe out.

On days like today the sport shines. (well, apart from the catastrophic stall failure that voided the sprint and relegated it to a less populous re-run once most people had gone home! but even that is reassuring in the sense that it's not just us that cock things up big time; the French can do it too! *woop*) And this afternoon was a great triumph for Girl Power, as the lovely filly Zarkava swooped to conquer her supposedy elder and better male competitors and made them look like a bunch of old donkeys! Hurrah!! (sorry Youmzain, sorry Soldier, I didn't mean to call you donkeys *kiss*)

We're also much chuffed in Sadie Towers that the latest installment of Dark Paths, our filthy/gorgeous vampire collaboration with the wonderful Bellora Quinn, is receiving lots of acclaim on Literotica.com. There's still time to head off there and read it, and don't forget to vote! Chapter 4 should be available by next weekend, and very naughty it is too.

And for the first time this weekend the sky outside my little window is blue! Yay, it's even made my rotten cold feel better.

Yes, another blog. I am presuming that this means I have climbed over some emotional barrier to bloghood which previously prevented me from regular assaults on the blogwaves for lengthy periods and that this in some small way means I have turned a metaphorical corner and am heading back up the home straight towards the winning post, representing some theraputic leap forward.

Of course there is also the fact that probably no one gives a shit if I blog or not, which leads me to the question of why do it at all. For a lot of people writing down the nonsense of their lives is a catharsis, a way of making sense of it all. It is there, on the screen ergo it is real and not just a nightmare happening to someone we've imagined. Whilst my life is in no ways perfect it could, in many respects be a lot worse. This is something I once resolved not to say because it was usually the precusor to my life taking a dramatic turn for the worst. Now I've come to accept that into each life a fair amount of shit gets thrown, I feel a lot calmer about things like saying "it could be worse".

Of course if you're reading this blog in six months and I'm writing from an internet cafe because I now live in a cardboard box under the railway arches at Kings Cross, you can take it as a dire warning that I was wrong to be so phlegmatic and, yes, things can get a lot bloody worse!! Oh yes!

But at the moment there is a kind of bucolic tranquility to my existence that is both enjoyable and slightly disturbing. Enjoyable for the obvious reasons of sunshine, wide open spaces and unpredictable but nonetheless enjoyable bouts of sex. Disturbing because I now have the 'doom' gene and am constantly wondering when this pleasant bubble will be burst, exposing me to the grim reality which doubtless lurks without.

As I write I am still without employment; something which ought to give me great joy as I do nothing but complain about work when I have it to do! But it is not so much the being without that disturbs me as the knowing that I have a job but not knowing when I will suddenly be expected to begin doing it. You can't make plans or get on with things under such circumstances. It's all very peculiar. In an effort to save money I am in a state of semi-temperance. My body is very puzzled by this. "Where are the copious amounts of cider, pringles and weed?" it demands in the plaintive Cartman-esque voice of a small, fat child abandoned by the side of a seldom used road.

"There are none." I explain to it in the solemn, rational tones of an adult. Then I have to listen to it crying for the next 16 hours.

This afternoon in another attempt to save money, I dusted the mouse shit off my bike and pedalled the five miles or so round trip into the nearest town with open shops that sell anything anyone might actually want or be able to afford; this small and pretty market town is jokingly referred to around these parts as "the metropolis". It is an essential part of Sadie's day to day existence as it is where the library lives and it has that most miraculous of things in our increasingly dumbed down, corporate-whore-world - an independent bookshop. It also has a very nice wine shop. (The fat child is now grizzling again!)

Ignoring the fact that I haven't regularly ridden a bicycle since I was about 14 years old; I boldly pedalled on, sweating like an Arab's donkey and managed not to fall off the bike or get run over by a combine harvester before I got there. Feeling virtuous I admired the fact that our society is not so far in decline that we have been denied such things as pavement cafes (I counted three, which for a town of approximately 5,600 people and a cocker spaniel is pretty good going) or a French Market (it's going to be either French or Farmers... around here generally the latter!) I bought some very nice Caemembert, in a fit of whatever the french word is for rampant cheese frenzy. *waves nice cheese at newly suited DC* resisted cake *doubly virtuous* and accquired a Guardian and some Linda McCartney country pies. (I had to go to the Co-op for the pies, obviously. The French consider vegetarianism to be a fatal disease!)

I also failed to resist the lure of the bookshop and ordered a book (by Martin Clayton, one of my MSpac friends... go and say hi to him). On my way home I had to stop to answer my mobile (a rare occurence as Sadie does not actively encourage people to ring her on her mobile if she can avoid it!) It was the  lady from the bookshop, politely apologising for the fact that the book was published in the USA and would take 2 weeks to arrive. I was not too distressed by this as I have a pile of things to read that you could quite easily bridge the English Channel with. I was however bemused by the fact that a novel by an English writer, about English people living in an English town has to be published in the USA where they probably couldn't find England on a map (unless they googled it). What is wrong with the English publishers? Too busy looking for the next Harry Potter, no doubt!

It has just occurred to me on examination that the other reason I probably don't blog so much is that bugger all ever really happens. Or is that just another state of mind? Oh well... at least the sun is shining.

 

It is the 13th of September today and also 23 years to the day since I lost one of my best friends and the inspiration behind the character of Rayne Wylde. Antony Ryder was my sister and my soul mate, we were the Freaks together and I still miss him to this day.

If you're out there Tones, I'm thinking of you today. I will never forget you, babe.

All my love. xx