Soon after I posted this morning with an idea for a literary center-slash-coffeeshop, a West Coast reader alerted me to the existence of theOffice in Santa Monica, which offers two levels of paid membership to their feng-shui'ed workspace: You can either drop in during normal business hours, or you can pay more for 24/7 access. Day passes are available Monday-Friday for $30, but, strictly speaking, you can't just walk in, sit down, and start writing. And while they do provide bottled water, coffee, and tea to members, that's not the same thing as a coffeeshop. So it sounds fun if you can afford the membership rates, but it's not quite what I was envisioning.

Seattle's Richard Hugo House, on the other hand, sounds almost exactly like what I had in mind, with not just a café and resources for writers and independent publishers, but a small theater and an art gallery thrown into the mix as well. Then there's Open Book in Minneapolis, which hosts the Coffee Gallery on the ground floor and The Loft Literary Center upstairs, along with two art galleries, one centered on book arts. (And, on the third floor, there's the headquarters for indie publishing's Milkweed Editions.) So now I just have to figure out a way to get invitations to Seattle and Minneapolis to do workshops on blogging for writers there...