Earlier this week, I swung by someone's office to say hello and she suggested we go to a nearby coffee shop, which turned out to be the New York branch of Showbiz Software Stores. The front half of the store is a café, but go past the counter and the tables and suddenly they're selling software for film and television production companies, along with books about the industry, and there's even flyers for workshops—mostly dealing with the software they sell, but also featuring the authors of books like The Pocket Lawyer for Filmmakers and Producting and Directing the Short Film and Video. "What a great idea," I said to my friend. "Nice way to capitalize on the fact that half the screenplays in New York are probably being written in coffeeshops."

And then I got to thinking: The people who aren't writing screenplays in coffeeshops are probably writing novels, so some enterprising literary organization should totally run with this business model. No, I don't mean just having a bookshop that also serves coffee, and I fully understand that you probably wouldn't make much money selling nothing but creative writing handbooks. What I'm envisioning is something like a much looser version of a writer's center—in fact, maybe what you could do is have a real writer's center, where the people who must work in silence are upstairs in their cubicles, for which they've got special memberships, but in the huge common area downstairs people are buying coffees and then typing away at their laptops, and maybe there're some books to buy, but the real draw is the evening workshops and readings, or the fact that sometimes the directors at the center will hang out in the café and make themselves available for consultation. Maybe you could sign up for short sessions, that could keep the interactive element from getting out of hand...

(You know, it just occurred to me as I was typing this that if you opened up the concept beyond literary fiction to include all sorts of writing, especially for freelancers, "mediabistro" would actually be an apt name for the place. Too bad they don't have a ground-floor space...)

Anyway, if any of you want to run with this concept, go right ahead. Just keep me posted—heck, if anybody does get a place like this off the ground, I'll volunteer to teach a blogging workshop.