Paying your rent as a writer is best done in one of a few ways: lying, marrying money, sleeping on the couch, selling your soul to a P.R. firm, or making the cut in the Hugo House Writer-in-Residence program. If you achieve the latter, you get to spend nine months chilling at the “Hugo Huts,” those quaint, former cannery cottages in Belltown that were saved and restored through a parks levy a few years ago. The downside is that you have to make yourself available to meet with the hoi polloi on a regular basis, as one requirement maintains you hold office hours for the public on a weekly basis. On the upside, you get a free place to crash from September through August, and, like Todd Faulkner—one of the 2006–07 WiRs—you get to spend more time working on your “humorous coming-of-age-in-foster-care memoir.” Because the world needs way more of those.—Karla Starr www.hugohouse.org/residencies/huts.