Super Bowl Update

When Laura Bynum phoned WriterHouse one day last spring and explained to Board Member Burnley Hayes that she needed a place to do the final rounds of editing on her novel Veracity, it seemed like a routine call. One of the services WriterHouse offers its members is secure, quiet writing space with a 24/7 access option. As the rest of the story unfolded, Burnley realized it wasn't quite so routine. Laura had been diagnosed with breast cancer on the same day her book had been contracted for publication by Pocket Books (a division of Simon and Schuster), and she was now commuting from Culpeper to undergo radiation treatment at Martha Jefferson Hospital. She needed to keep going on her book to meet the publisher's deadline and also to keep her focused on something other than her disease.

Laura became a member of WriterHouse and began spreading her manuscript out on the floor of one of the writing rooms, holing up for hours at a time to work out the complex chronology of her speculative fiction story. She finished her editing on deadline, beat her cancer, and on January 5th, the WriterHouse community celebrated the publication of Veracity. Because that's really what WriterHouse is—a community.

A lot of people hesitate to join WriterHouse because they don't need a place to write, and I tell those people they're missing the point. It's not just a place to write, it's a community that revolves around writing. It's a gathering place for meeting other writers and commiserating about the work; it’s a place to learn from each other and from instructors with MFAs, visiting authors, literary agents, and journal editors; it's a place where people get to know each other well enough to ask "would you mind reading my story and telling me what you think?" It's also a place where, even if you have a perfectly good writing space in your house, you might get more done because you've made an appointment with yourself to go somewhere specifically to work on your writing with no phone, laundry, chores or family to interrupt you.