Trendy Hotel Wants You to Finish Your Novel in One of Their Rooms

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Have a novel you haven't quite finished? Want to spend a few weeks in the trendy, only-slightly-NYU-student-overrun East Village of Manhattan? Well The Paris Review and The Standard hotel (don't know the html for writing upside down, sorry) have an offer for you!

The literary journal announced on Tuesday that it is partnering with playboy hotelier André Balazs's Standard East Village to offer one soon-to-be-novelist the writing opportunity of a lifetime: "The idea is this: in January, a writer with a book under contract will get a room at the Standard, East Village, in downtown Manhattan, for three weeks’ uninterrupted work." So you submit an application, consisting of a sample and a letter from your editor, and if they pick you, you get to shack up in this brand-new boutique hotel (converted from the "old" Cooper Square Hotel) for three weeks to finish that damn book of yours. As noted, you have to be under contract, so you can't submit the Torchwood fanfic that you've been meaning to self-pub. No sir, this is only for legitimate writers. (As deemed by a small group of publishing people in New York City, anyway.)

What's not to like about this opportunity? Free living space is always nice — you can Airbnb whatever dump you're currently slaving away in — and you can't beat that location. Plus The Standard is awfully cool. Sure you might end up writing some mysterious model in a glass box into your novel ("I thought this took place on a farm in the 1930s Dust Bowl?" — Your editor) and, yeah, there are like a bajillion bars in that neighborhood so you might find yourself a little distracted, but three weeks of a change of scenery is probably just what you need to finish this book. Using that thing that blocks the Internet on your computer for like two hours at a time didn't work. Going to your grandma's lake house was a bust because you found some of your cousin's old weed in the Monopoly box, so there that week went. And lord knows you're not going to go to some kind of library.

So this is your chance. Finish your novel in style! That way when you come back into town for the reading and there's only a polite smattering of applause at the sparsely attended after party where everyone seems awkward and won't make eye contact with you, you can at least take a chilly walk down Bowery and stare at the hotel and shake your fist at it and have something to blame other than yourself. Good luck!