1. Pay yourself first

Put at least 20 percent of every check you make in savings or an investment account. Open and regularly fund your SEP IRA or other retirement account. Pace yourself to make the maximum annual contribution to your retirement accounts. If you have a child and don’t have a 529 account for education savings, you should.

2. Remember taxes

Most beginning freelancers forget to set aside money from each check for tax payments. Don’t forget. You might end up needing to scramble for $25,000 or more at the end of the year.

3. Buy this recording thingee. In conjunction with a voice recorder, it works on any phone anywhere.

http://www.amazon.com/Olympus-TP-7-Telephone-Recording-Device/dp/B000GU88CQ

4. Exercise

Four times a week or more.

5. Dress, Groom

Wear something during the day that doesn’t make you look or feel like the Unibomber.

6. Confer

Pay to go to gatherings, conferences, whatever you think will bring you ideas. I love TED. It’s expensive but invaluable. I also love GEL. There are many many more.

7. Sit in Circles

Get a group of writers, thinkers — the most interesting people you know. And have them join you once every other week. You’ll talk one at a time about where you are, what you want out of life, what’s getting in your way and where you want to be this time next year. The power of this sort of gathering will astonish you.

8. Respect old-world office hours

Don’t harass editors on weekends or after hours. Only exception: if you’re sending your story in early.

9. Be a leader

Don’t get mad, don’t get pissy. Instead, show them by example how you expect people to behave.

10. Think outside the box inside the box.

For existing publications, you’ll need to nail the form, the tone, the conventions of the outlet. But do this: separate yourself from other writers by upping the standards within the existing guidelines. Write the best L.A. Times Travel story the L.A. Times Travel section has ever seen. Blow the mind of the Salon editor by getting more comments on your Salon-perfect piece than any other essay this month. That sorta thing.

I just made these up. It only took me 18 years of freelancing to think of them:

10 Surprising But Essential Tips For Freelancing

1. Stop Being Paranoid.

People aren’t stealing your ideas, they don’t hate you, they’re not being passive aggressive. And if any of these things actually are true, move on. Life’s too short and brutish to be eaten up by pettiness and small-minded paranoia.

2. Set fake deadlines and meet them.

The editor wants the story December 15. Great. Your deadline is now December 12.

3. It’s about relationships, stupid.

Good pitches will get you assignments. If you want an actual career, work on nurturing and building your relationships with editors instead.

4. Lose the Emoticons

Rid your emails of the following: your smiley faces, your inspirational quotes, the websites of your 15 different businesses. It makes you look flaky.

5. Be nice

Why would YOU want to work with someone who’s cold, whiney, hard to reach on the phone, sloppy with the facts, defensive or a drama queen. Exactly. Editors don’t either.

6. Go back to school

Specialize in something that will give you an advantage over everyone else in your field. Afterwards, you might decide to go for that career full-time and bag freelancing permanently.

7. Have a kid or buy a house

Adding big incentives to making money will force you to behave responsibly and meet your financial goals in ways child-free, mortgage-free people can’t quite imagine.

8. Meditate

Every morning. For at least a half hour. Doesn’t matter which god or non-god or spaceship you pray to. Just do it for 30 days and see what happens.

9. Ixnay the naysayers

By 5 pm today, remove or block all the negative grumps on your Facebook and Twitter lists; make an appointment to see one person who’s been really supportive of your work; whenever good or positive thoughts or people emerge, think of ways to sustain, develop, nurture, augment and encourage them.

10. Put others first

Say thank you. Do things without expecting thanks. Surprise people with your generosity. Give more money than you expected this end-of-year tax season. Do things for free even though you don’t think you can afford to. Say yes when people ask for your support and help.

This story is up on The Huffington Post today. Take a look:

Fame has always been a numbers game. The weekend box office gross. The square footage of your Malibu estate. The hits you get from Googling yourself. With Twitter, numbers tell a deeper story. The more famous your Tweets, the more followers you have. But what do loyal followers get in return? Not much, it turns out. The famous rarely follow you back.

Celebrities That Actually Care About You:

Karl Rove
47,988 Following 51,465 Followers — 93% (percentage of followers he follows, as of May 20, 2009)

Yoko Ono
38,310 Following 42,887 Followers — 89.3%

Barack Obama
775,801 Following 1,205,516 Followers — 64.4%
Celebrities Who Think Some of You Are Interesting:

Arnold Schwarzenegger
53,352 Following 159,756 Followers — 33%

Britney Spears
376,909 Following 1,512,820 Followers — 25%

Stephen Fry
54,989 Following 509,319 Followers — 10.8%

Richard Branson
6,579 Following 109,571 Followers — 6%

Gavin Newsom
23,661 Following 425,507 Followers — 5.5%

MCHammer
26,023 Following 670,498 Followers — 4%

George Stephanopoulos
8,191 Following 599,760 Followers — 1.4%
You = Mosquito:

Coldplay
2,636 Following 844,647 Followers — 0.3 %

Steven Colbert
51 Following 229,932 Followers — 0.02%

Ryan Seacrest
220 Following 1,035,509 Followers — 0.02 %

Paris Hilton
10 Following 97,562 Followers — 0.01%

Jimmy Fallon
101 Following 1,023,021 Followers — 0.009%

Ashton Kutcher
150 Following 1,825,703 Followers — 0.008 %

Miley Cyrus
45 Following 624,466 Followers — 0.007%

Senator John McCain
43 Following 642,415 Followers — 0.006%

John Mayer
47 Following 1,099,168 Followers — 0.004%

Oprah
13 Following 1,093,986 Followers — 0.001%

Al Gore
7 Following 827,691 Followers — 0.0008%

Mandy Moore
2 Following 443,004 Followers — 0.0005%
Wait. Who?:

Sylvester Stallone
0 Following 5,228 Followers — 0%

Neil Diamond
0 Following 13,937 Followers — 0%

The Potty Train keeps on chuggin’! We were very pleased to be featured in Daily Candy Kids today

Check out our Tips for Potty Training and good luck!

As part of my ongoing effort to keep the public informed about celebritykind, I frequently visit the homes of famous people. Sylvester Stallone lives in a faux-Mediterranean castello high above Beverly Hills with a Rocky statue guarding the pool. Robert Redford’s Napa Valley residence is, like the actor himself, a vision of weathered grandeur. Singer Josh Groban has a suit rack in his master bedroom that rotates like a dry cleaner’s.
Nobody, however, had a house like Nick Nolte’s. The actor’s Malibu home burned to the ground today after an electrical malfunction set his private office ablaze. Flames spread to the kitchen and living room and soon a plume of black smoke mushroomed above Zuma Beach. The L.A. County Fire Department is estimating the damage at $3 million.
We are told – in fact, it is part of my job to tell you – that celebrities are just like the rest of us. But that wasn’t the case with the way Nolte lived here. For starters, it wasn’t just one house but six separate houses on a six-acre compound by the Pacific. Nolte moved into a small pink house there shortly after 48 HRS and he slowly amassed a whole subsection of the neighborhood. The property’s guesthouse and a two-story brick structure where Nolte slept had belonged at different times to Tommy Chong and Don Henley.
As I wrote in a Premiere magazine profile of Nolte shortly after my visit, “After you spend a little time here, with the jasmine blooming and the gulls crying and the barefoot houseguests breezing in and out (there are always houseguests), you get the sense that Nolte isn’t just of Malibu, but rather that he is Malibu. On Nolte’s refrigerator, there’s a photocopied newspaper image of one of the local kids, `an actor of some renown,’ Nolte deadpans, on a recent trip to Baghdad. Above it, someone has written SEAN PENN WILL LEAD!”
The interview that day, which started at 10 am, was supposed to go an hour. But as day turned into night and Nolte kept talking, I lost track of time. Part of it was there was simply so much to see. In a room off his bedroom, Nolte (at that time, at least) maintained a Frankenstein-style science chamber to monitor the condition of his blood. Under a giant cardboard cutout of Jesus, which Nolte plucked from the set of Lorenzo’s Oil, the actor kept IV drip bags, hospital-grade oxygen canisters and flat-panel computer screens flickering with data about white and red cell counts and who knows what else.
Nolte asked that day if he could have a drop of my blood. I declined. But he delighted in telling me about others who had taken the dare. Director Ang Lee’s blood was “fascinating,” he told me, saying he’d never seen anything shimmer like that. “You watch white cells surround bacteria. You see the death of things. It’s better ‘n television. His blood was glorious.” When I asked Lee afterwards about the experience, the director said, “It was the most gothic feeling I ever had.”
Over in Nolte’s artist’s studio was a different kind of wonderworld. The actor was concerned at that time about dendrite growth in the brain. Specifically in his brain as well as his son, Brawley’s. Dendrites are the connections between brain cells that indicate learning and Nolte wanted his family’s dendrites to be growing like Sea Monkeys.
Nolte flashed a crooked smile and gestured to a now-popular Japanese arcade contraption known as Dance Dance Revolution. It blinked with colorful lights atop booming speakers and there was a light-up dance floor. Nolte fired it up and said, “We all have hand-eye coordination but not eye-foot. This machine challenges you to find a whole new set of learning muscles.”
Just being at Nolte’s house was doing that for me. Toward the end of the night, we were sitting in the living room in the main house that caught fire today. The lights were off. There were cherubs on the ceiling. Chinese furniture. Copulating Japanese figurines. Didgeridoos in a giant urn. Nolte talked about why he quit drugs and about that really bad hair day when he was caught on Pacific Coast Highway by the cops a few years earlier. Then he said he wanted to show me something. We walked in the darkness to yet another structure and into a room, mostly empty except for Oriental rugs that blanketed the floors and walls.
“I love this house and I love this room,” Nolte told me, “and this is where I’m going to die. And then after I’m dead, this is where they’ll bring my casket and where I’ll rest in peace.”
Tonight that room is probably gone. But Nolte is still with us, and with a mind like his, snapping with connections and full of ideas on how to live, he’s probably already worked out a backup plan.

As part of a regular feature on the analog world, I give you the obituary of Martin K. Tytell, typewriter wizard extraordinaire. Mr. Tytell takes with him the mysteries of the Royal, the Underwood and the Olivetti. Read about him here.

I had the opportunity to take a test flight yesterday on Emirates’ sparkling new double-decker Airbus 380, one of the world’s largest planes. The plane flew a jug-shaped loop around LAX, mostly over Catalina and the Channel Islands, while the 250 of us aboard –including astronaut Buzz Aldrin — got to play with the cool stuff inside.

It’s a very very big airplane and after waiting for a couple hours for it to arrive from San Francisco at our little private runway at LAX, they let us climb onboard.

The plane has everything: wireless internet, 1200 video channels, games you can play with other passengers via your console and live cameras from the tail, wing and underside that let you see where you’re flying. Watching it, you feel disembodied from the experience, especially since the plane is so quiet, but it’s a cool feature. Here’s a little video of what that looks like: Airbus Navigation Screen

Once we reached cruising altitude, the captain said we could walk around, asking that we not stay in one place longer than 15 minutes. As we filed up the spiral staircase in the rear, the crew was handing out glasses of Dom Perignon.

We were pretty hungry, though, and I made the mistake of reaching for some of this sushi when I got to the upstairs bar. Someone very forcefully said, “Sir, that is only for display. It’s been sitting around since yesterday.” I hate display sushi.

But I love the weird business class “shanty town” just beyond the bar.

It’s a very strange visual — little cubbies with chairs that flip back electronically into flat beds. There are flat screens, too, and holders for all sorts of drinks. I’d be fine flying to Dubai in one of these.

Then again, there’s first class. Fourteen private wood-paneled cabins, each with a stocked fridge, a basket of food. I stole a Hershey bar and a copy of Harvard Business Review. The big draw, though, is the shower. Yes, shower.

You book it for 20 minutes and inside there’s a heated floor, shampoos and other products and the full-sized shower itself. The plane carries only an extra 130 gallons of water which means the showers can only last five minutes. All that for $14,000 a seat.

After about two hours, we arrived back at LAX where they gave us a swag bag with things like a tiny model of the planet in a black velvet box. I would have preferred a voucher for a free round trip ticket somewhere.

I asked members of Upod, the group I run for professional writers and editors, to send links to their blogs and websites and send they did. If you take a look here, you’ll see how talented and productive a community it is. Among the many, many (which represents only about a tenth of the total Upod community), there are writing vodka makers, vodka-drinking taste makers, thrillists, banterists and someone who ambushes the unfashionable in Central Park. As we say in the group, In Pod We Trust.

My cousin Leah’s boyfriend’s mom has an interesting take on Obama’s Berlin speech in today’s NYT. You may recall Leah’s photo from a few days ago — the one that made Obama look like the guy from Jack-in-the-Box.

Change Germans Can’t Believe In

I have an essay in the August issue of Reader’s Digest on learning to play the mandolin as an adult. It’s one of my favorite stories. Doing the photoshoot at McCabe’s Music Shop in Santa Monica with Lori Stoll made up for the humiliation of having to play in front of actual human beings (including my family) as described in the story. Click here to read it.