Announcing Upod Academy IV — Giant Steps.

February 3, 4 and 5, 2012

10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day

Marina Del Rey, California

$695 tuition

I launched the Upod Academy last spring to share what I know about writing professionally, something I’ve been doing for 20 years. For three beautiful and intense days, 15 writers from across the country gather around a table with me to face the fear, kick bad habits to the curb and leap boldly into….

Wait. Let me just tell you about the results:

Someone from a recent PodCad, a woman in a self-described “pitching slump,” sold two feature stories to big national publications in the first three weeks after the workshop (total take home: $5,000+). A guy from last spring’s session who shared his “pie-in-the-sky fantasy” to be on NPR is now a regular correspondent for them. A young writer who had never sold a bylined story is now getting assignments from places like Salon, without even pitching. Long neglected book proposals are being finished, writers are booking trips to meet New York editors, obsessive Facebookers are declaring 30-day Facebook sabbaths. People are asking for raises, quitting stupid gigs, clearing cluttered desks, exercising for the first time in years.  I’m telling you. This Upod Academy. It’s a whole thing!

What I love most is the momentum that starts during these three days and how it continues to fire. On the most basic level, the Upod Academy is about getting unstuck. That’s why I’m calling the next Upod Academy…PodCad IV — Giant Steps.

After three days, you’ll know which ideas work and which don’t; how to pitch and how not to pitch; what habits work best in the current writers market and how to impress the right editors at the right publications in the best ways. Plus, you’ll eat a lot of homemade chocolate (my wife’s a pastry chef), eat amazing healthy food, and meet great, wise, funny, helpful people. Among those people are our three speakers:

1. Cortney Pellettieri, west coast editor @ Good Housekeeping and all-around good egg.

2. David A. Keeps, freelancer extraordinaire @ Travel + Leisure, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest and ∞ more.

3. Taffy Akner-Brodesser, a Upod superstar whose freelance career went from zero to The New York Times, WSJ and The New Yorker in less than two years.

Meanwhile, here’s what happens over three days:

The Upod Academy Experience

Community: Whether you live in L.A. or not, the ne plu ultra of your PodCad experience will be connecting with like-minded souls to support and affirm your efforts as a writer. You’re really going to come to rely on these people, trust me.

The Long View: A rare chance to step back and assess where you are as a writer and think deeply about where you’d like to go. To me, this is the real luxury of the weekend. Asking open, honest questions with a thoughtful group about the best direction for your life and work.

Money: You want more of it. I’ll tell you how to get it. The immediate financial goal is to double your investment in this class with pitch ideas we develop together over the weekend. Tripling and quadrupling (or 1,000x-ing) your investment is acceptable, too.

Inspiration: What PodCadders especially appreciated was identifying what I call “the stories only you can tell.” These are the stories that take you from anonymity to “instant credibility” with pieces in places like The New York Times, Salon, Esquire, Fast Company and beyond. Start thinking about it now: What are the stories only you can tell?

Focus: Stop procrastinating, stop finding excuses, stop blaming others for your career setbacks. Wait till you see the tricks and exercises I have for tackling these puppies. Prepare yourself for Mr. and Ms. Thumb Slam.

Perspective: You’ve probably heard how much it sucks being a freelancer right now. What you may not know is, you’ve been fed misinformation. I can safely say this the most exciting time to freelance in the nearly 20 years I’ve been at this. Success in this realm is all about being the right writer with the right idea in the right place at the right moment. I’ll tell you everything you need to know about how this gets done.

Vision: You won’t leave empty-handed, and I’m not just talking about Ruth’s trademark chocolate typewriters that everyone goes home with. You’ll exit the weekend with a 30-day plan for your career and a clearer mission for the months and perhaps years ahead. And I’m not kidding when I say you’ll have a new circle of writing BFFs ready to hold you accountable, call you on your crap and cheer your every success.

Burning Questions: Answers to literally every question you have as a freelancer, from the truth about multiple pitch submissions to how to make your Twitter feed the most essential resource in your freelance repertoire.

“The Stream”: That’s my term for the torrent of creative people, places, projects, technologies and practices changing the way we writers do business. Tapping into the stream – and I’ll show you exactly how and who the key “thought leaders” are – could easily be the most valuable and lasting benefit of your PodCad experience.

What PodCadders Are Saying About The Upod Academy:

“Inspiring! Spirit lifting! If you’re feeling stuck, unsure or like all hope is lost, the Upod Academy will help you break out of that negative thinking and energize you to work to your maximum potential as a writer.” – Michelle Lanz

“I’m feeling so refreshed from PodCad it’s like I’ve woken up from a multiple-months daze. Thanks David!” — Will Taylor, writer for Outside magazine.

“I pretty much cried all the way back home. In a good way. So much of what you said over the weekend clearly resonated. ‘Live boldly,’ for starters. ‘Have fun.’ ‘There are lots of ways to change the world.’ My notebook is filled with your brilliance. What’s more, to see you living this – without any of the hand-wringing, print-is-dead rhetoric that’s been saturating the Web – was so incredibly refreshing. You’re a changemaker. Like Oz…but without need of the curtain.” – Leslie Garrett

“So inspiring, thought-provoking and heartening to share what has been a mostly private struggle with a roomful of empathetic, interesting, supportive allies.” – Ari Karpel, writer for Fast Company, Time, The New York Times.

“I came to the PodCad expecting a fun and inspiring weekend. I left PodCad with an entirely new and inspiring career direction. Wow!” — Nicole Nazzaro, writer for Sports Illustrated and elsewhere.
“Took the scariness out of pitching.” – Jennifer Netherby

I’ve been in the mag business a long time, so I’d been on the fence about doing the PodCad thing; it felt a bit embarrassing to admit I had plenty to learn. Still, I wanted to see if I could up my game — learn work more efficiently, pitch more accurately, break into new and better markets. The Cad provided lots of tips for reaching those goals, but it also addressed issues that may matter more in the long run: How to grapple with the uncertainties of freelancing; how to structure your days (and weeks, and months) in the absence of a nine-to-five gig; how to tamp down the angst and ramp up the joy; how to escape home-office solitary confinement and find potential co-conspirators; how to figure out what you really want out of writing (and life), and how to pursue those things in a more focused and confident way. Props to Hochman. Dude can teach by example, as well as by classroom methods. He’s an original thinker, but also a skilled synthesizer of ideas from far-flung sources. He’s good with systems, but also with the more intuitive, emotional stuff. Fine sense of humor. Knows how to listen. Incisive in his criticism (of story ideas, pitches, and self-defeating habits), but generous with encouragement. Just do it.
– Ken Miller, former West Coast Editor, Reader’s Digest; People magazine editor and more.

“If you have any trepidations about your career, money or life path. Take this workshop! You’ll get more than you can ever imagine.” — Linda Arroz

“Every journalism school in the country should offer a Upod Academy — an intensive course that helps writers understand how editors think, how the business of writing actually works and how to find the freelancer ‘sweet spot,’ where interests, skills and opportunities intersect.” — Joe Donatelli

“A rare opportunity to spend three days with like-minded people thinking about issues essential to the writers’ life. Being part of the Upod Academy felt like a gift I gave myself.” – Michal Lemberger

“Transformational. A life-changing experience.” – Imani Dawson

“Upod Academy rocks! What a great three days. You really did over deliver.” — Kim Kowsky

The Details

February 3, 4 and 5, 2012

10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day

Marina Del Rey, California

$695 tuition

Home-baked breakfast pastries, phenomenal lunches, healthy snacks and handmade chocolates included. For further information and to RSVP, contact davidhochman at me dot com.

I recently spoke to Carl Honoré about living a more meaningful, “slow” life. He’s the author of In Praise of Slowness and an all-around cool guy, especially for a Canadian. He shared some advice that’s particularly relevant to freelancers. Thought I’d share:

“Something that’s very important is the power of saying no. We find it so, so hard to do. Especially in the workplace. We think that if we say no, we’ll be discarded or scorned or fired. As a freelancer especially you think you need to say yes to any offer on the table. But it’s not the case and shouldn’t be the case. Often you say no and because you’re the only person saying no, the editor or person offering the job will be impressed. You will stand out. It’s important to explain why you’ve said no. Say something like, “I want to do the work I do well rather than doing it fast.” Or, “I don’t think I can do this to the standard I aspire, or that this project deserves, therefore I’m turning this down.” If you put it in that language, what often happens, at least in my case, is that the person comes back to offer work again, and with another offer, usually a better one. Because you’ve set yourself apart from the mob of people saying yes, yes, yes manically at every turn. In many cases, slow wins the race.”

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%

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.

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.