This diary, because I’m writing it as soon as I get up, is more about yesterday than today. Yesterday I did an interview with Gabriela Blandy. I met Gabriela quite a few years ago, when she worked for the Arvon Foundation at The Hurst, John Osborne’s old house. Since she left there three years ago, she’s been doing coaching for writers (a bit like what I was wondering about in my lecture on Sport – there I asked why top writers didn’t have prose psychologists, physios, but most of all motivational coaches, aiming to get them to write faster and better). Gabriela always looks superhealthy, as if she’s just finished a triathlon. She is olive skinned with tight ringletty hair and wears significant jewellery. Like others, she’d taken Diary at face, even though she’d read the December entries. I thought she might be offended I wasn’t going through those things now; if she was, she processed it and hid it. The interview was great. She threw some quotes at me, from the December entries, but they weren’t things I regretted saying. This was for Gabriela’s YouTube channel, slogan #writenomatterwhat, and so I tried to be positive as well as honest. Gabriela is planning to buy a forest – the further north it is, the bigger it can be – and run writing retreats with ecologically very low-impact or no-impact accommodation. We talked about that before she pressed record. Because I know her, and she wasn’t attacking me, I felt able to be open. She gave me some good advice about YouTube. She’s been posting two videos a week for three years. Regularity is what you need. (Diary has been regular.) She most definitely has a brand – approachable, a little hippy, market-aware (in the sense, she knows who she’s after and knows what they’re after). When we’d finished, I was glad to have done the interview – whereas I usually only feel shame and self-disgust for getting up on my hind legs and barking ‘Edelweiss’.
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