The Grand Adventures of Daisy Donnie

All Righty

Lisa Sinclair — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:10:19 +0000

Much to the amusement (I expect) of some of my good friends, I am going to reconfigure book one. Again.

Mainly this is because I’ve decided it needs to be a bit easier to follow. And the work I’ve done on book 2 suggests that it would be good to have a single coherent storyline for each character (as much as is possible) in each book. Mainly this is to avoid my going completely nuts trying to remember all the different bits. It’s also, ultimately, to make things easier for the reader.

So, in the words of the great Daffy Duck:

Yoiks! And Away!

The Grand Adventures of Daisy Donnie by Lisa Jane Sinclair is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.daisydonnie.com/contact/. 9ae3f9335452f165d38cf62b412d20be (38.107.191.117)

My first rejection

Lisa Sinclair — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:59:39 +0000

Unfortunately the publisher I sent parts of the manuscript to have passed, with this pleasant (and rather quick) letter to that effect:

Thank you for sharing your work, The Grand Adventures of Daisy Donnie, with us.

Unfortunately, this manuscript is not quite what we are looking for at this time.

Please keep us in mind for any future submissions.

One down… many to go! They were great though, didn’t keep me waiting for very long. I expect it wasn’t Science-Fictionny enough for them, which is true – Sci-Fi is only one aspect of the stories. But onward and upward as they say!

Very neat: book 1 submitted for consideration

Lisa Sinclair — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:11:23 +0000

I’ve gotten off my ample arse and started submitting DaisyDonnie to publishers.

The first off the bat is Edge and Tesseract books in Canada who specialise in Science-Fiction and Fantasy novels. One of the major problems I’ve had with Daisy Donnie (other than a singluar inclination to actually buckle down and submit the book to a real publisher!) is that I wasn’t sure of the genre. The answer came to me one day:

JUST PICK SOMETHING!

It didn’t matter. Just pick something and go with it. Stop procrastinating. Or rather, start doing something (as “stop procrastinating” is technically a tautology, where procrastination in this sense is not doing something, and thus to “stop” doing it was… oh, all right, a double-negative? Whatever. It doesn’t matter!)

While chatting to Sabine, a new friend, I mentioned the “Fuck-it” moment that I often get to, where all the procrastination and hand-wringing just finally frustrates me and I just say Fuck It, and do what I need to do. More often than not this results in getting whateveritwas done quick-smart and thoroughly disproving the internal dialogue that said :

Oh, it’ll take ages and be really hard and boring and difficult and hard and stuff…

So, I got an answer from them this week:

“…Thank you for submitting your manuscript to EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. We strive to attend to our submissions as quickly as possible. Our turnaround time on manuscripts is approximately four months. Please be assured that your submission will be read in due course…”

Which is pretty neat!

Who are Daisy and Donnie?

Lisa Sinclair — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:19:04 +0000

True, they are members of the Penfolde family, but that isn’t revealing much.

They have a terrible past, but let’s be honest here — who doesn’t?

Granted, at twenty one and a bit, they’ve had their fair share of parties, drugs, running and encounters with famous people… but they can’t be said to have a lot of miles under their belts.

So what makes them special? Or at least special in that way that everyone else is not.

One thing: they jump from one reality to another. We’re not talking about what a fifteen year old does when their hormones start to hammer their bodies rapid-fire, all mood-swings and argumentative attitudes.

We’re talking about alternate realities, parallel worlds, worlds where things are different but somehow the same; worlds where wrestling reigns supreme and other sports take a back-seat… worlds where Elvis lives!

And worlds where males and females have separated into warring factions — the BSD and The Sisterhood — with only The Church of Elvis^TM standing between them, led by His Eminence, the King of Rock and Roll, Marcus and Prime by his side, and Daisy or Donnie depending on the reality in question.

And there’s the other thing that makes Daisy and Donnie slightly different to your average reality-hopping protagonists. They swap bodies.

There seems to be no rhyme-nor-reason for it — all they know is they wake up with a killer headache and need to take a quick grope to verify who they are.

This, understandably, makes human interrelationships a little more terrifying than usual. One minute, they’re chatting with someone nice, the next they wake up in another reality with only a vague recollection of what they might have been doing beforehand.

And they’re not alone — there is the homicidal, yet quite polite, Assassin chasing them from one reality to another, making their lives more complicated than they already are.

Somehow, somewhere, sometime they might work it all out, and they might just meet one-another again.

But for now, they jump…

Now read on to find out more, with story 1: Fire with Fire…

That’s better

Lisa Sinclair — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:46:56 +0000

DaisyDonnie has been suffering of late. I haven’t been here for a good month what with being busy with writing lots and lots of words in the right order to make new stories.

But a facelift was in order, and I hope you like it. No longer are there the interminably long menus, dropping off the page. No longer are there difficult to find posts and content. I’ve restored the “blog” front page and will redo the pages so they’re actually meaningful.

Also, it means there’s a summary of the post with a “read more” link, and in the cases of the stories, even a display of the pages which you can jump to. The categories — which the stories are linked to so they’ll appear in the right order — are down the right side in the sidebar now. This makes things FAR easier to read!

So thanks to the theme designers. You can download and read about the theme at the uchilla blog page.

Old Sci-fi

Lisa Sinclair — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:03:13 +0000

When I was little I absolutely loved a particular TV show. I don’t know why I did, whether it was the stories, the hardware, the fact there was a woman in a lead role, the man in charge or simply the concepts. It was the first TV show I actually noticed and my first experience with such a thing.

Sure, I knew kids shows like Mr. Benn, That one with the person coming out of the box (which was used to such great effect in Life on Mars)…

But nothing touched this show, and oddly enough still hasn’t. And I truly hope it’s re-imagined a’la Battlestar Galactica (which, incidentally, pinched an idea from this show for their opening credits), because, frankly, the ideas and concepts (and this is series one) were top-shelf.

After Star Trek, the Sci-Fi front was pretty bare, and this was the first show in a long time to come along that actually came close to its appeal. This, however was British sci-fi, with brooding, dark (in some cases horror-based) sci-fi stories. Which is what the British do best. And strange as it seems, there were no wobbly sets. Doctor who scared the pants off of me when I was this little (as did Star Trek, especially that Corbomite Maneuver alien). But this show I could watch and watch. There was an emotional element that I hadn’t seen or experienced anywhere; a decent and fair male role model, a female role model who was caring and stood up for herself when the chips were down, the merlin-like scientist. It was all very Arthurian, but with a twist of Homer’s Iliad thrown-in for good measure.

In future years, in the bleak time between the fall of the show into parody when a new producer came along (although as a child I didn’t mind the changes; as an adult I grew embarassed by the low, low quality of these episodes) and the advent of late-night TV, I caught only the odd episode here and there. I longed for a way to keep the episodes, but there was no way to do-so. Nobody had video recorders at this point (this dates me to be sure), and so I had to keep a sharp eye on the TV guides. The drought was long. So very long.

In the 90s I saw with amazement that they were back on. At 4am. And I videoed the lot, even editing the adverts as I watched episodes I had half rememembered, or even hadn’t seen at all. It was amazing! Self-taped videos turned into DVDs some years later, and now I occasionally eye-off the enhanced all-inclusive DVDs available to-date only in the UK for extortionate amounts. The exchange rate might have changed by this point though, so they may yet be affordable as my one and only christmas pressy to myself.

It’s odd though to wake up wanting to write about it; fankiddies the world over have done this time and again. It even rates conventions, but the new owners aren’t interested (or don’t have the cash) for a decent remake. It may yet rise in the public eye again, but more likely will remain the chosen vice of a few who appreciate those precious things: a childhood memory and oddly compelling stories.

Maybe you’ve guessed what it is by now. But here’s a doco for those that haven’t:

2-17: The Long Night

Lisa Sinclair — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:40:06 +0000

He woke with a killer headache and instinctively felt between his legs. Satisfied, he opened his eyes. They focussed finally and unfortunately they were pointing at a television screen, high in the corner of the room, a room that turned out to be a shop, a shop that turned out to be a burger bar. An all-night one at that.

He rubbed his eyes, then checked his ears; no, they were working fine — it was just the music-video was crap. It didn’t surprise him.

Donnie Penfolde pushed back from the red formica bar and almost fell off of the stool which was fortunately nailed to the floor. Well, embedded into the cement floor. At least it was stable, which was the last thing he could think of as something resembling his life.

A glance out the window behind him revealed it was night, and his watch confirmed it — 11.33pm. The sign over the door declared this was Danny’s burgers, closing at 2am if Donnie’s memory was right. He asked for a coffee and it was delivered in a paper cup. He wasn’t surprised.

The music on the TV disappeared for a moment, only to be replaced by something featuring a lot of wailing which turned-out to be what the Americans called Rhythm and Blues, and which he called crap. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d swum against the flow of popular culture; his attire attested to this simple fact, for while the other people at the bar (could he call this a bar if they didn’t serve alcohol? He decided to try and see how it felt), were dressed in a mixture of artificial fabrics, blends, company logos and jeans, he wore a pinstripe suit and trilby. This seemed odd even to him, so he took the hat off and left it on the bar where it attested to his dress-sense being a left-over from the 1940s. Could he help it if the Private Investigator’s Union had decided on a Phillip Marlowe uniform? Would be a bit difficult for the females in the profession, and he felt their pain.

Donnie wondered why he was here. The coffee was hotter than a high fire-risk day (no naked flames, no outdoor barbeques), and he had yet to receive any sustenance of an edible form. His burger arrived. By the look it was a Chicken Breast Fillet Burger, hold the chicken breast. He couldn’t work-out why he’d ordered lettuce and mayo in a bun, but decided to live in the now, and took his first bite. He needed the coffee to wash the taste from his mouth. What was the bun made of, sugar and more sugar? It was only the sesame seeds on top that made it anywhere near a savoury item rather than belonging squarely with the ice-cream sundaes and whipped-cream he would have ordered for dessert if Danny’s served that sort of thing. They didn’t, so he ordered another coffee and a Chicken Breast Fillet Burger, hold the lettuce and bun. He got a look from the man behind the counter which could have been a stomach complaint.

A man sat down next to Donnie, and he coughed heartily into his handkerchief, checking it for spots of blood.

‘Is there blood on this,’ asked the man. Donnie was surprised to say the least, but it was late and he had nothing better to do.

‘Yes,’ said Donnie, reading the message on the handkerchief.

Five minutes later, the fillet arrived. Donnie had left a ten dollar note as payment but wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the protein. It was a pity because he’d need it.

There was an alleyway behind Danny’s. One end was the fifth sector and Danny’s burgers. Halfway down there was a checkpoint and beyond was the sixth. The sign declared that he was leaving the Australian Sector for the French. Someone had spraypainted a cheery “Bonjour” beneath it.

2-14:On the road to nowhere

Lisa Sinclair — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 08:50:38 +0000

Daisy Penfolde turned from the swings and walked away, trying to ignore her daughter’s squeals of delight as she ran to Caroline Rook’s waiting arms…

She felt numb, but all things considered, that was at least something. With her legs on automatic, she moved through quiet streets without even the tears to mourn the loss of her child.

Do you forgive me?

Eva had answered the question, said it wasn’t her fault, and such it was. Daisy couldn’t help the jumps, she couldn’t help what had happened. Couldn’t help…

She felt a nagging worry: why had she resisted the Sisterhood in the first place?

It seemed a distraction, but this act was at the core of the events of the last few hours… of her whole existence: Why had she resisted?

And the road stretched onward.

She heard the crackle of dead leaves and felt the dirt beneath her feet as she walked, barely noticed weeds and dandelions growing up through the cracks in the road and pavement. What was it Smith had said? Something about the area North of the border being ungoverned.

It looked perfectly fine to her.

Unexpectedly she craved a cigarette and a coffee, but neither were to hand. Realising this was just another distraction, she kept walking.

The problem of why she had resisted still remained. She considered the possibility that it could have been a future jump, one where she was trying to avert the mistakes of the past.

‘And that helped the last time didn’t it,’ she said, her voice sharp and sarcastic in the silence.

She stopped momentarily. Self-hate for the events of the past was a waste of time and energy. She couldn’t change the events of the past…

But she could though. The last time had been an utter disaster. If she’d kept her mouth shut and just observed things might not have turned out the way they had. That reality was one bad decision after another though.

Another thought rose: why had Elvis been in the cafe waiting for her? Was it a predetermined meeting-point? She had walked into it quite by accident… or perhaps more likely on automatic.

I am writer, hear me scribble

Lisa Sinclair — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:12:04 +0000

It’s been a few weeks — well, nearly a damn month — of hard work and supposed cashy money to offset the lack of creativity. Course, I’ve written four short movie scripts which I’ll post in a subpage on the site, but other than that there’s been no DaisyDonnie action whatsoever.

This is about to change however.

While doing some rote scanning this week for a rather nice client who paid in advance (thanks bernadette!) I was able to do a spot of editing of a key story in Daisy’s path to infamy. This will be uploaded later today once I’ve worked my way out of a particular box I’ve found myself in.

But refocussing on the books rather than the business has been hard, especially with demanding clients who don’t get that I don’t work 5 days a week and not on Mondays or Fridays either. It’s slightly irritating — well really irritating — that I worked 5 hours today too. Not Happy People. But, there’s a mid-week deadline for the work I did today so I couldn’t avoid it. C’est la vie.

Enough of bitching and whining.

I am writer, hear me scribble.

Without aim, nor reason, we travel on

Lisa Sinclair — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:40:10 +0000

Pinpricks of distant light fall upon the earth and the moon. This light is millions, billions of years old.

There comes a sudden flash of orange and green; and something falls through from another reality: A ship.

It is listing, dying slowly; damaged perhaps beyond repair. If there is anyone still on-board, they’re either unconscious or dead. And if they’re not, they should be trying to get off.

The ship slowly, perhaps gracefully, tumbles, spins slowly as its engines activate once again.

There is another flash of greeny-orange, and it is gone.