Sierra Godfrey Takes Readers on a Delightful Greek Journey in 'The Second Chance Hotel'

Former graphic designer and current technical writer, Sierra Godfrey, stops by to discuss her second novel, The Second Chance Hotel: A Novel. Set in a fictional island in Greece, The Second Chance Hotel is a romantic comedy that follows Amelia Lang, a young woman from San Francisco, who goes through a series of unfortunate events, beginning with a fallout with her boyfriend, which leads to a mug throwing attempt to his head at work, which then causes her to get fired from her job, all of which leads her to run off to Europe for the next three months, where she meets her love interest, James. Godfrey explains, “So Amelia and James have been traveling around Greece for a couple of months, separately. They don’t know each other there and they land on a Greek island, a small Greek island that doesn’t get a lot of tourists, and it’s kind of the last stop on Amelia’s tour and she’s going to have to go home and face some things that she’s done, so she’s not really looking forward to that… they’re the only two guests at the hotel… and one night they get very, very drunk, and accidentally get married and find out the hotel owner has died in the night and left them the hotel… They’ve got guests coming and it turns out that a lot of the island relies on the hotel as a money source, generating source, so they decide, ‘ok, we’ll take care of the couple of guests who are coming and then we’ll get out of here and leave this behind,’ so they struggle with that a little bit.”

Having lived in Santorini for a few years as a child helped Godfrey make the decision to set her story in a fictional Greek island rather than a real town in Greece. “Santorini is the island I know best, but it belongs to many people and it’s also extremely crowded, so I knew going in that I needed a less traveled island and one of the smaller ones would do great, but I hadn’t been there and I didn’t want to do any island injustice by assuming a lot, and I think I would’ve had to… So making up an island… it’s allowed me to control the environment in a way that I needed to for this story because the island is very small, the tourists don’t come very often, there’s an infrequent ferry, it’s not on one of the big ferries from Athen’s stops… and no cruise ships, which is key…”

For authors seeking publication, Godfrey suggests, “Read widely in the genre that you want to write in, read as much as you can, pay attention to what you like and pay attention to what you don’t like, and know that there’s a lot of rejection and none of it’s personal. It’s a business and if you give up, then you don’t get there. So, giving up under the weight of all that is not going to make you succeed. It just doesn’t.” She also disagrees with the myth that an author either knows the craft or doesn’t, and that improvement in writing isn’t possible. “I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you can absolutely improve. I know I did. The first novel I wrote was like 160,000 words… it was terrible, terrible! I didn’t know anything…”