3/6/25 – Two weeks and counting… I’m heading to the “Bird Hotel!”

Hey there happy reader, 

The day is almost here… I’m leaving for Guatemala and Joyce Maynard’s Writer’s Intensive Workshop less than two weeks from today, and I still truly can’t believe it. I’ll be spending seven days working on my new novel, “The Stones” in a magnificent setting… Lake Atitlan in Central America!

I’ll be staying in the hotel that Joyce built during Covid. 

She’s owned property in Guatemala for many years, but during the pandemic she decided to help the local workers by building a larger structure, which kept growing! Now she is the proud proprietor of a beautiful hotel, Casa Paloma, and holds her workshops there.

I must admit that I’m more than a little bit nervous about this trip. 

I’m not an “outdoor” type of person. I much prefer sitting on my couch curled up with a good book or the latest episode of “1923.” When the first information email arrived, I truly questioned my judgement in choosing to go to Guatemala at all. All participants are reminded to shake out their shoes before putting them on to avoid a scorpion bite! What??? Let me tell you this: if I see a scorpion, this NYC girl will probably faint dead away! But, on the other hand, I never back away from a challenge…

There are eight writers, (including myself) attending this workshop. 

We each work independently during the day and have multiple opportunities to have Joyce mentor us along the way. Each night we are to gather and read to each other from the pages that we’ve completed that day. That kind of immediate feedback is invaluable and should help me make “The Stones” a compelling read. The week on the lake will be a wonderful experience – scorpions aside – and I hope to get a lot done without the distractions of my everyday life. There are no pickleball games in Guatemala, lol!!

More seriously, this is an unbelievable opportunity, and I plan to make the most of it! I realize that it’s a tremendous privilege to have been invited and to have the ability to go. I don’t want to waste a minute of it!