Blogger Gala Darling

Happy New Year! Now, how about kicking off 2009 with a little icing? I'm referring, of course, to the popular blog iCiNG, as well as to its fabulous owner, the inimitable Gala Darling, to whom I spoke one blustery Saturday afternoon the very night after Halloween. The lovely lady, who has probably had more different colors of hair than you have years old, had a lovely conversation with me about Halloween, about New York City and its marvels, about the seasons, about magazines and blogs and a wide variety of things.

[phone rings]
Gala speaking.

Hi, this is Keely!
Hi, how’s it going?

It’s going well; how are you?
It’s going very well, thank you.

So where are you going off to? You mentioned [via email] that you were leaving the country soon.
I am. I’m going back to New Zealand on the 18th of November and I’ll be there for Christmas and summer over there.

Oh, how lovely! Opposite hemisphere, opposite seasons.
It’ll be nice, yeah.

I’m more of a winter person.
Oh, I can’t stand winter. Like, I like the fashion and everything, but I can’t deal with cold temperatures. It just doesn’t make me very happy, so I’ve kind of resolved to chase the summer around as much as I can. I seem to be doing pretty well so far.

Yeah. Well, you certainly have the opportunity to do so; with iCiNG you can pretty much work anywhere in the world.
Exactly. And I did design my work and my lifestyle so that I would be able to be really as accessible as I needed to be. And it all worked out rather well!

Wait, so which part of New York City do you live in?
I live in the West Village.

Oh, you do?
Mm-hm!

What made you decide to live there as opposed to some other part of the city?
Um… it was kind of a coincidence. I saw an ad for an apartment on Craigslist and came to look at it and they offered it to me and I just basically moved in, and as I’ve been here I’ve just discovered that the neighborhood’s really amazing, so I totally lucked out with that.

Yeah. The West Village is a pretty cool place.
Whereabouts are you?

I’m in Brooklyn. Come here a lot?
Well, when I came back here in September I stayed with my friend in Brooklyn for about a month, and that was interesting. She lives in a really suburban area, which is totally not what I think of New York as being, so that was pretty unusual for me.

What part of Brooklyn was that?
Um, she lives around Avenue H.

Oh, yeah, that’s way out.
Yeah, totally. It was all big suburban houses and families, and it was pretty unusual.

Yeah, Brooklyn’s pretty—it doesn’t really get suburban until around there, and then if you keep going you hit Coney Island.
Yeah.

So you really seem to love the city, judging the way you talk about it on iCiNG.
Mhm. I love the energy of the city; there are just so many people here and these people are here for a reason. They’re not just here to subsist, I think. Pretty much everybody I’ve met here is here for a really good reason; they have a purpose, and that’s really inspiring to be around. And also, I think New York—I don’t think it’s the world’s most difficult city or anything, but I do think you need to work pretty hard to scratch your way into some kind of reasonable living situation and everything, so everyone’s pushing really hard in one direction or another and I find that really inspiring as well. New Zealand is really small and quiet, and when I was living in Melbourne, Australia, it was pretty much the same. It’s very low-key, people are just coasting along and chilling out and everything, and that’s cool but I’m not really like that. I can’t really relax. So being somewhere where everyone around me is as nerved out as me and they’re all as intense and preoccupied and product-oriented as me, it’s good for me, you know?

Mhm! Yeah. Well, for sure, there’s always something happening here, and there are so many opportunities, which is fantastic.
Mm. I was watching the Village Halloween parade last night because it basically goes past my window and I was sitting on my fire escape. And the creativity is fantastic. Just seeing how much effort everybody puts in, I found that really—it was just fantastic. It was really good to see.

Did you dress up last night?
Kind of, but not really. I dressed up as a rubber nun last Thursday and went to this Mariah Carey party, which was a total bust. It was so bad. But last night I decided to wear something slightly warmer, because I was freezing on Thursday, so I wore a Betsey Johnson dress and just like a hoodie and bunny ears and stuff, and I didn’t really do much. I walked around with friends and looked at people’s costumes and had a meal. It was good.

Well, you know, if you’re ever lacking for a costume on Halloween, you can always wear heels and tights and one of those scarves that are so popular now, the keffiyehs, and you can say that you’re a resident of Williamsburg.
[laughs] That’s true. That’s true. I found some really good costumes out where I went. It was so much fun. I’d never really had Halloween in America and I finally got to and it was so good.

Yeah, Halloween’s a lot of fun when you’ve got things lined up. I mean, there’s always something happening on pretty much any night, though, so you can always find something to do in the city.
That’s true.

What are some of your other favorite cities [besides NYC]?
My other favorite cities… hmm. I love Paris, but I haven’t spent a lot of time there. I just find it a really interesting, beautiful city. Where else do I like? I don’t even know, actually. I can’t even think of anywhere!

[laughter] Well, then it’s good that you live in New York!
Totally! I think I need to travel more. Maybe that’s the problem.

Well, there’s no shortage of great—and like I said earlier, you can take your work wherever you go, so that doesn’t hinder you.
Totally, yeah.

So how did you start iCiNG?
Basically, in 2006 I quit my job at UVM Post, which was extremely boring, and my boyfriend whom I had just gotten together with and I went to the States, we went to Burning Man, we went to New York, we hung out in San Francisco, we went to Norway and England and all those places, and then we moved to Australia from New Zealand. And I decided I just couldn’t deal with getting another normal job again. I felt like I had done my best, and I realized that I was really just repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, which never works, obviously. And so I sat down and I wrote a list of what I thought I could do to make money, and having a blog was one of them, and it was the first one I took so I was like, “Okay, let’s give it a go,” and I wrote my first article and I was hooked. So that’s basically the start!

Well, it was successful! I mean, it’s really grown into this whole community, almost, with your blog at the center of it.
Yeah, yeah.

Watching it grow, were you surprised by the way that it took off?
Um… it’s hard to say, because I feel like it was a long time ago. I mean, this year will be the two-year anniversary and I feel like it was such a long time ago. But I was surprised at how quickly it grew, especially because I didn’t do any promotion or anything like that. The way that it grew was by word of mouth, which was amazing. I think that the thing I was mostly surprised—I wasn’t that surprised by the number of traffic I was getting; I was more surprised by the people who were stopping me in the street and being like, “Oh my god! You’re Gala Darling!” That was the most insane thing. And to this day it still weirds me out when that happens. I mean, it’s fantastic, but it’s really unusual, so. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s interesting, because there are popular websites and popular blogs but iCiNG is something almost entirely different. It’s kind of more than that.
Yeah, it’s a really unusual blend of things. I mean, it started off as a fashion blog, and then I realized that if you’re miserable and you’re wearing a nice pair of shoes, that doesn’t really make a difference in your life whatsoever. I guess I would like to think that I’m not that shallow, that I’d not be like, “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter, just wear the good shoes.” So it kind of expanded to be how you can make your life happier and how you can really live a life that you’re delighted by. And also there’s a lot of—I wouldn’t say personality blogging; it’s kind of like—I’m making those little quotations with my fingers right now, but there’s definitely a lot of “here’s who I am and here’s how I live my life”, and when I broke up with my boyfriend I had to make a public announcement because I knew that if I didn’t people would keep asking me, and that’s kind of unusual as well. And the thing that I’ve noticed is that the more information I give out about my life, the more people want, which is kind of—I always try to keep in mind that the reason people come to my website is because they want something for them, like they want help with their problem or they want inspiration or whatever, it isn’t about me, so I have to keep it as non-egotistical as possible.

Right. Yeah, it’s a balance. A lot of it has to do with fashion, or with those style tips that you post like “buy flowers that match your hair”, but then some of it is also learning about you.
Yeah.

Speaking of which, you’ve got those style tips, and normally you would assume that those were about clothing, but they’re really about lifestyle or about doing little things or about inspiring happiness. When did you start doing those?
Oh, I’m not sure. A really long time ago. I think it probably was one of the earliest features that I started with. And it just sort of sprung up. Like, I often has these ideas and I would often just write them down and they ended up kind of looking like a list, so I thought, “Maybe I should just post two at a time and see how it goes,” and they’re one of the most popular things on the site, which blows my mind. It’s rather unusual to me, but, yeah, people love them. It’s really cool.

You also have a feature where you interview people of various interesting professions, like “I want to be a…poet” or “a…tattoo artist”. How did that develop?
I’m not really sure how it developed. No, somebody emailed me and said, “It would be really good if you covered more career stuff,” because I’d written things like how to run a blog and how to get a job at Lush cosmetics because I’d worked there for a year and a half, and somebody said, “Oh, it would be really good if you did some other career stuff,” and I said, “Shit. Well, I haven’t really done that much, so I don’t know what I could write about.” Then I was like, “Wait a second, I have a whole lot of friends who have amazing jobs that are totally this untapped resource.” So I just started contacting them and saying, “Would you mind answering some questions for this segment?” And I’ve talked to my friend who makes cupcakes for a living, to a graphic designer, a poet, all kinds of stuff.

Yeah, you’ve got health counselors and lingerie designers, so a completely wide variety of unexpected professions.
Yeah, I’m trying to make it as varied as possible because people reading my website—I have people who are 12 years old and women who are 65, and they’re all so different. So it’s useful if you can make it as broad as possible, because everyone’s gonna be into something else.

Right. Another really, really popular feature is Things I Love Thursday, which has gone beyond iCiNG; people make their own Things I Love Thursday list on their blogs and their websites and it’s become its own sort of phenomenon.
Yeah, it’s an amazing thing. It’s totally blown my mind. [laughs]

You’ve said before that the reason you started doing that was because you felt compelled to keep a list of things you were grateful for?
Yeah, I learned I guess a couple of years ago that being grateful is really a huge tool in terms of feeling happier about your life and everything. I mean, if you spend your time thinking about all the crap in your life you’re obviously not going to feel very good, but if you think of awesome things then it’s kind of a cumulative effect and you start to feel better and better and better. And I just think doing it every week is a great thing. I mean, I know people who do it every day; I can’t really muster up the time to do that, I guess it’s not that important to me, but I basically have a file on my computer called “TILT” and I update it over the week, and whenever I think of something I just put it in there and then I just post it on Thursday and invite everyone else to do the same.

In general, what’s your daily routine like, especially regarding working on iCiNG?
Well, I try to get up before 7:00 in the morning, because I do my best writing before midday, so if I wake up at like 9 or 10 I feel like I’m rushed for time. I’m not sure why that is; as soon as the sun gets high in the sky my brain stops working. It’s strange. But I wake up at 7:00, I check my email because I’m a nerd, and I drink juice, and I take my vitamins and then I start writing, and then I’ll probably write until maybe 11 or 12, and then I’ll post something, and then the rest of the day I kinda do what needs to be done. So that might be replying to email, I might go shopping… [laughs] I dunno. It really depends on what the day holds for me. My life is pretty unstructured. I guess the only thing that’s pretty concrete is that from 7 to midday I’m pretty occupied.

If after reading about iCiNG you find yourself jonesing for a sugary-sweet fix of your own, check out iCiNG itself. Here's hoping Gala will forgive all my atrocious puns.