There’s a lot going on at the moment, and I must be feeling a wee bit stressed, because I’ve had the sudden urge to number things.

1. Two more reviews have come in for Night Beach.

Book’d Out: Night Beach is a novel that got under my skin, complex, breathtaking and compelling, I can only insist you experience it for yourself. This is a story that stays with you, haunts you and despite its young adult label deserves an adult audience.

Spellbound by Books: I’ve read everything she’s written so far, and this is by far my most favourite read.

Thanks to both Shellyrae and Melissa for taking the time to read the book.

2. And due to a late scratching, I’m going to be blogging all this month at Inside A Dog – the Centre for Youth Literature’s website for readers. The CYL have been phenomenally good to me, inviting me to Reading Matters last year, and taking me to Geelong, and now this. And my only response to date has been to steal their Facebook photos. So I’m going to try really hard to be a good Writer in Residence for them.

3. Which leads me to the favour. If you’ve got a chance, I will love you forever if you visit me over there and leave a comment or ask a question, or get involved in the GIVEAWAY I’ll be running. (It’s a separate giveaway to the one that’s happening here on the 27th of May).

Okay, that’s all for now. Have a great day. This is what I’ll be listening to:

Remember how I said I was going to blog more about the book? Well, I’m going to cheat instead. Alpha Reader has just posted an interview I did with her, which includes a lot of the paintings mentioned in the story, and she’s done a much better job than I’ll ever do. So if you’d like to read it, please click here (and you can read AR’s review here).

(I thought I’d follow her example by sprinkling a few images around to zhush things up a little – all NB inspired, of course):

There’s also a review in Australian Bookseller + Publisher (who I don’t think have ever reviewed my stuff before, so thanks Meg Whelan!):

Dark and seductive, Night Beach will leave you breathless. A thrilling and suspenseful combination of the real and the supernatural, this is not a novel to read alone at night! Kirsty Eagar paints a detailed picture of the claustrophobic surfing town, full of complex and intriguing characters. Highly imaginative and lushly described, it’s an enthralling world that will captivate readers just as it possesses Abbie. Eagar’s novel takes ideas with a usually positive portrayal, such as the ocean, art and love, and subverts them, capturing their darker underside and the dangers of obsession. This is a great book for older young-adult readers. Fans of Eagar’s Raw Blue—which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for young adult fiction—will love her latest supernatural thriller.

And there are a few reviews out in the blogging community already. So a huge THANK YOU, as always, to you guys for taking the time to read and respond. (I should say, too – I know about reviews when they get passed on to me, either by the reviewer, or by Penguin, or someone in the know, so if you’d like to see yours mentioned, get in touch).

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cuddlebuggery

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And my editor, who knows me very well, sent me a link to this one by Trin in the Wind because it’s sort of everything that I was trying to do with the story (which I know doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to feel that way about it, but it’s still nice that one person did!)

I also really like Trin’s instructions for reading the book:

1. Read at night
2. Read at night while it’s raining
3. Read at night while it’s raining and you’re home alone
4. Let yourself go.

Finally, there’s a GIVEAWAY to come, which will kick off on the 27th of May. Yes, a bit delayed, but 27 is a really good number, and you can fill that time in by thinking about whether you prefer chandeliers or moons.

Have a great day, peoples!

These guys’ music makes me want to write. Love, love, love them. If you’re a pop whore like me, you will, too. I read them described as hipsters somewhere, but if you look at this photo from their Facebook page you just know that label doesn’t do them justice:

Every time I come here I remember I was going to blog a bit more about Night Beach and I feel bad. It hasn’t happened yet, but once I get my current commitments out of the road (please soon God) I’ll do more and hold a giveaway and mention some reviews to self promote my arse off shine some light on what you can expect. O’right? Hope your Sunday’s humming.

Is now up on the Penguin Australia website. You can read it here …

Night Beach has gone to the printers. Now, I feel like I’m just kicking around. Listless, a bit cranky. There’s heaps of things I should be doing. I even have deadlines. Instead …

I’ve found new ways to waste time. For instance, I’ve designed a stamp to use for book signings. I’ve been needing a bit more theatre in that department. Other authors have bookmarks, ribbons, feathers, glitter, dirt – all sorts  of stuff. But the only time I’ve ever cut loose was at my first book signing. I had to borrow a pen, and I wrote something so stupid I’m not even going to say what it was. It was like a car crash between a motivational speaker and a desk calendar. Awful. Truly awful.

Anyway, the stamp. I started with this (which of course means nothing to you now, but if you read Night Beach all will become clear):

And I changed it to this, with help from Emerson (“Live in the sunshine, Swim the sea, Drink the wild air”) – who is also referenced in the story:

So there you go.

What’s that? You think I should stop wasting everybody’s time and get back to work? You’re probably right.

One of the very nice things about writing Night Beach was that if I needed to get myself in the mood, all I had to do was run around the net searching for the sort of art that would inspire me. I looked at Dan McCarthy’s art a lot. To me, his work is similar in feel to the paintings from the Romantic Era that I love*. It often features the human figure dwarfed by the natural environment – woods, mountains and the heavily starred (and so beautiful!) night sky. And, of course, he had me at ultramarine blue.

One of the chapters in Night Beach is called The gloaming in his honour (after a series of paintings he did with the same title).

I figure the internet must have completely transformed the playing field for new artists. In addition to the gallery system of exhibiting and selling paintings, they have the option of self-managing the distribution of their work. So, in plain English, Dan releases screen prints regularly for sale. I bought three of them, and now I get to enjoy his work every day. It’s even better in the flesh. Another thing I found is that the same word is hidden in each of them. Disguised and embedded. I like that.

His posters are beautiful, too:

If you like Dan’s work, and are interested in seeing more on his process, check out his Facebook page. And you might also like another Dan’s work – Dan Danger. The two of them are exhibiting together in San Francisco in April, and it’s one show I would love to see.

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*I did a post a little while ago on how the Romantic Era artists, poets, writers were big influencers on Night Beach, see here.

**All Dan’s work shown here with permission.

Raw Blue has the glitter skin, but it was only as I looked at the previous post I realised Night Beach has the glittering lights. Huh. Funny how you find patterns. It’s a recurring thing through the story. What do you call that? Motif?

At seventeen, I’m in‑between. Staring at the carnival from a distance. Not sure if I want to go forward and become an adult; liking the view too much to turn back. Drinking and cars and Kane and freedom. All those glittering lights … (from Night Beach)

Fishermen at Sea (JMW Turner)

One of the big things in Night Beach is obsession, and Abbie, the main character, is definitely an obsessive type. Aren’t we all? Anyway, while a guy called Kane is probably her most dangerous obsession, it’s her fascination with art and the ocean that help to define her. What I loved about writing the story is that it was influenced by so many things and ideas; working on it was like going exploring every day. Sorting through a big box of cool shit.

Romanticism was definitely an influence. Nothing to do with love, or being romantic, but the artistic movement that includes authors like Goethe and Thoreau and Poe. Mary Shelley. Poets like Lord Byron. Artists like Joseph Turner. The good old Encyclopaedia Britannica lays it down as being about: the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

They were awed by the natural environment – mountains, the sea, the sky. I love their take on awe. A not entirely comfortable feeling that somehow straddles delight and terror. A reaction to bigness.

From Romanticism it’s only a small leap into Gothic fiction, the supernatural, and symbolism, all of which fed the story, too. I leave you with the deliciously creepy painting, The Nightmare, by John Henry Fuseli. As you can see, he leaned towards the supernatural …

So I’ve bounced back from the shock of netgalley, realising that it means I can now QUOTE my arse off. This is from Night Beach.  Abbie, the main character, is remembering her grandad. One of the things I was thinking about while writing it is how losing that special grandparent is kind of like losing your childhood …

He came down here every day. In summer, he’d swim in the tidal pool. In winter, I’d often see him standing at the very edge of the rocks beyond the pool, staring out at the horizon, enjoying the cold spray and bracing winds. You could almost hear his big breaths of contentment, each one another share in the secret. That’s what this place is in winter: a secret. In summer it’s the place to go, and everybody’s here. But winter sifts out the true believers. The ones who can’t stay away from it, and love it in all its moods. People who can’t breathe unless the air is salty.

Someone emailed me to let me know they had ‘approval from netgalley’. Me, being me – vague at the best of times – didn’t know what that meant. So I checked it out. It means they can read Night Beach. The current version. Now. Before it’s polished to within an inch of its life. While there still might be MISATKES.

How long has netgalley been around? To think that yesterday I was just blithely listening to The Clash, happy because I didn’t have to face the real music yet …