Author Archives: Rachelle Ayala

About Rachelle Ayala

Rachelle Ayala is a USA Today bestselling author of contemporary romance and romantic suspense. Her foremost goal is to take readers on a shared emotional journey with her characters as they grow and become more true to themselves. Rachelle believes in the power of love to overcome obstacles and feels that everyone should find love as often as possible, especially if it's within the pages of a book. Her book, Knowing Vera, won the 2015 Angie Ovation Award, A Father for Christmas garnered a 2015 Readers’ Favorite Gold Award, Christmas Stray received a 2016 Readers' Favorite Gold Award, and Playing for the Save got the 2017 Readers' Favorite Gold Award in Realistic Fiction. She is also a writing teacher and founder of the Romance In A Month writing community. She lives in California with her husband and has three children and two birds.

Grand Canyon Adventure #RachelleAyala @Mimisgang1 #mgtab

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My Visit to the Grand Canyon

I have no words to describe the majesty and awesomeness of being at the Grand Canyon. The beautiful views and the colors and textures are overwhelming. All I know is I had a memorable time with my two sisters and brother-in-law last week.

We were fortunate with the weather. It was cool in the morning and never got above seventy degrees in the afternoon. Upon arriving at the South Rim, we couldn’t get enough of the view. It was everywhere, since the path of the Rim Trail is about two and a half miles along the edge. We walked along the paved Rim Trail and then took a short hike down the Bright Angel trail, a series of switchbacks that descend from the popular Bright Angel Lodge. Even though it’s a “beginner” trail, well maintained with water stations, it was quite steep and we had to keep warning ourselves that traipsing downhill is easy, but what goes down must come up.

After a few turns of the switchbacks, I noticed the people coming up looked like they were red, sweaty zombies in a death march. Since the Grand Canyon is at high altitude, 6800 ft, we decided to turn back and were able to enjoy the hike back without passing out.

Watching the sunsets and sunrises make for more spectacular views and photos. We drove all the way to the East, Desert View, where there’s a tower [which is closed], and then made our way back, stopping at the view points. Being there, you get the full sense of the panoramic view, as well as the dry wind that blows sand and dust in your face. There’s the chapped lips, the dry mouth, and the sting of sunburned lips, but nothing takes away from the sheer beauty of the views, including a few patches of snow visible in a shadowed area.

We also took a trip to the Hualapai Reservation where they offer pontoon boat white water trips. Instead of paddling, you hang onto your seats on the sides of a motorized pontoon boat while the driver barrels through rapids for maximum splash and bumps. It was quite an experience and you can read my review at Yelp for the Hualapai (Walla-pie) River Runners. Another must-visit place is the Yuvapai Geology Museum. Out of their panoramic bay window, you will see rock formations from all the different ages. Finally, we ate several times at El Tovar Dining Room–a rustic restaurant with views of the Grand Canyon.

Since I’m a romance writer, I took a picture of a pair of lovers perched on the edge of the cliff watching the sunset at Grandview Point. I’m sure I’ll be coming up with a romance or romantic comedy set at the Grand Canyon. I learned about the grueling hikes, down the South Kaibab to the river and then up the Bright Angel, and I stood by while the mule guide was giving the orientation to the riders. Maybe I’ll have a personal trainer and a swapped itinerary for my heroine who finds herself on a vacation she didn’t expect. Yep. Grand Canyon is for Lovers.

Grand View Lovers, It’s a Long Way Down

Catch up with my books at my website. https://rachelleayala.net/ and if you’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, I hope you’ll be able to make it there someday. Aloha!

The Feminist March Hare #RachelleAyala @Mimisgang1 #mgtab

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Since it’s March, I’ll tell you a little about March Hares. The snows of winter thaw in spring and it’s the time of new birth and life. There’s perhaps no better symbol of life and fertility than the March hare. They are quick on their feet, lively and boisterous, and may even be a little mad, like the one in Alice in Wonderland who’s always having tea.

March hares have been associated with witches and other spritely female spirits because of their “dancing” behavior or as some supposed, fighting off male suitors. Fertile females will cavort and then run away from males. If any catch her, she’ll turn on him, striking him and trying to fend him off. She’s bigger and stronger and runs the show. Their dancing is wild, boxing and lunging at each other, until she accepts him as her mate.

Fun fact: Did you know a female hare can get impregnated while pregnant? The new embryos move into the womb when the previous litter vacates. Quite efficient. No wonder hares and rabbits are honored as symbols of fertility.

In honor of the feminist March hare, I hereby declare March as Bad Boy month. I have a new giveaway for you! A bad boy named Liam Donovan who has to fend off an impersonator while chasing Marisa Monroe from the streets of Dublin to the wilderness of the Burrens for his shot at landing her heart.

March Specials:

Sweet And Sassy

My own Valentine’s romance #RachelleAyala @Mimisgang1 #mgtab

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My 40 year romance. Happy Valentine’s Day!

As a romance writer, I’ve written over seventy-five love stories, from princesses and kings, to ranchers and busybodies, to demigods and bank greeters and all points in between. But funny thing, I’ve never written my own forty year old love story with my husband, Jose.

We met at Cornell University in 1982 at the International Living Center, heretofore known as the International Loving and Living Center. I was brand new, fresh off the turnpike from California and going from suite to suite introducing myself. “Hi, I’m Clare from California (Rachelle is my penname),” I’d chirp. “I’m so glad to meet you and experience the East Coast.” Never mind that Cornell, in Ithaca New York is in the Fingers Lake region and not East Coast. To me, anything west of Arizona was East Coast. I had most recently lived in San Diego, at the time known as America’s Finest City or Sandy Eggo. All my friends thought I was looney-tunes wanting to leave but I told them I wanted to see what life was like outside of this most southwestern corner of the United States. I mean, if Maine is the head of the beast and Florida the front leg, Texas the back leg, then what exactly is the southernmost corner of our country? At least it’s not Hawaii, LOL.

My future husband was sitting in his dorm room contemplating his future when one of his suitemates said, “Hey, meet Clare from California.” I kid you not. I never have inklings but I had a strong sense of, “What if this is my future husband?” run through my heart. Of course, I didn’t say anything and later one, he thought I was too happy and too chirpy. He’s a native New Yorker.

Fast forward to spring time skiing. I hadn’t seen Jose around and he didn’t see me, but on my first run down Greek Peak on a beautiful, sunny day, I skidded to a stop on top of a ridge to admire the view. The next thing I heard was a man screaming, “Ahhhhh!” and then my right leg crumpled. This wild skier literally tripped over my ski boot and fell face forward over his skis. His first reaction was to get up and ask me how I was doing. I was actually numb or in pain, I don’t know which, but he had a bleeding cut on his forehead from hitting his ski.

The ski patrol was called and the man and his buddies followed down to the medical center where the biggest strongest ski patrol guy pried my boot off my injured leg [as painlessly as possible].

If this was a romance, the man who cut his forehead would be Jose, or even the strong ski patrol guy, but nope, I never saw them again, although the cut forehead guy did come by to apologize as I lay there waiting for my friends to drive me to the hospital.

Instead, Jose had stayed back in the dorm over spring break to STUDY! Get this, I stayed to ski; he stayed to study. So here I was, a day later, sitting in the TV lounge with my crutches and leg in a cast watching daytime soap operas. Jose walks by probably with a stack of books in his hand and says, “What happened to you?”

From then on, he carried my books, walked me to the dining hall, and bussed my trays. And that’s how a real life love story started. Not quite a cute meet but a sweet one just the same.

How about you? Please share one of your real life love stories. Tell your children or a friend this Valentine’s Day and give your honey an extra kiss for being your real life Valentine.

My Valentine Romances are either FREE or on sale this month of February.

Valentine Hound Dog [free download]
Valentine Wedding Hound [on sale 99c]
Going Hearts Over Heels [on sale 99c]
Valentine Puppies and Kisses [free download]

For more freebies and a chance to win a $25 gift card:

https://mybookcave.com/g/5bbf53fd/?bcsrc=pmf38a

Hugs and Kisses and have very Happy Valentine’s Day, Rachelle

Teaching an Old Gal New Tricks #RachelleAyala @Mimisgang1 #mgtab

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Today (January 13) is my 62nd birthday and strangely enough, I feel younger than I did 20 years ago. My face might be more lined and I have a few more gray hairs, but I’m learning new tricks and trying new things and happy that I’m still around.

It’s never too late to try something new. Here are a few things I learned this past year.

  • Improving my Photoshop skills by using a pen tablet. I don’t know why I didn’t try this earlier, but drawing with a mouse or on a touchpad while holding it down with another finger is so antiquidated. But it was all we had twenty years ago, and that’s what I learned on. Who remembers mouses with those balls underneath on spongey mousepads? I remember using AmigaDraw with my Commodore Amiga computer to make simple graphics. How time consuming was that? So last year, in 2021, after a prolonged session of Photoshopping using the infamous Lenovo red button resulting in painful index finger and wrist pain, I bought a Wacom One Drawing Tablet. It’s about the size of a small laptop. It has an electronic pen and it fits on my lap while plugged into my computer. Night and day! Now, I can draw shapes and select objects with no problem. I can connect dots, do those Bezier curve handles, and ink in sketches as easily as using pen and paper. As for signing my name? Piece of cake. Why did I wait so long?
  • I finally converted to using Scrivener writing software. For years, I was a Microsoft Word gal. After all, before Word came out, I used LaTex, a non WYSIWYG word processing solution and “vi” to create the files. After my Amiga died, I got an MSDOS machine and have been with Word forever and never took the time to learn any of its advanced features. When Scrivener first came out, I bought a license but it was too complicated so I put it away. Early last year, Scrivener sent me a survey and while filling out the survey, I wondered if I could get more organized by using it. After all, I was constantly revising my writing AND saving off copies of my drafts. Up to 20 drafts with dates appended to the filename. Scrivener made it easier to organize my deletes. I can now simply create a folder for each chapter’s deletes and copy over deleted text with a note on why I deleted something. This way, if I ever want to resurrect that text or storyline, I only have to drag it back to the manuscript and insert. I’m sure there are a hundred more reasons why Scrivener is useful, but for me, keeping track of all my “deletes” makes it worth using.
  • Intermittent Fasting. This is an “old” thing that is becoming “new.” Back in the day, before microwaves and trail bars and snack-sized treats, we ate three square meals with no snacks and nibbling in between. If we were hungry between meals, we went outside to play instead of sneaking into the cookie jar. Snacks were not a thing. They would spoil your appetite. Parents thought nothing of sending misbehaving children to bed without their dinner. No one would starve by skipping a meal, at least back in the days before microwaves and juice boxes. In the late eighties when the price of microwaves dropped enough to be commonplace, people started eating all the time. Snacking became a thing, and families stopped eating together at the dinner table. Along with all the eating came the massive increase in weight gain. I, too, joined this eating pandemic as my weight crept up steadily during my thirties, forties, and fifties. We just believed it was part of getting older. Little did I know that snacking constantly, especially on so-called healthy snacks like trail-mix bars, smoothies, and flavored yogurt, that I was putting myself on a constant elevated insulin state. My body was always in “grow” mode, where sugar enters the blood. Insulin comes in and mops up the sugar, stuffing it into cells, and the cells store the extra energy as fat. Because I was snacking and eating continuously, I didn’t allow my body to have a chance to burn off any energy since it was always available. It turns out that fasting, or not eating for a long stretch allows your body to go into “burn” mode where insulin is no longer in control. You don’t enter this state until 4-6 hours after your last meal. Once you are in “burn” mode, glycogen is depleted first. After about 20-36 hours, your body switches to fatburning mode. If, however, you feed yourself at anytime before entering fatburning mode, you are instantly back in “grow” mode, where food is mopped up and stored for future use. The problem with eating all the time is that the majority of time, your body is in “grow” mode and eventually, if you fill your body with too much sugar [even excess protein gets turned into sugar], you will become insulin resistant. It isn’t the fact that you don’t make enough insulin [assuming you’re not a type 1 diabetic], but the fact that your cells are FULL of sugar and they are barring the gates to more sugar entering them. This excess sugar ends up in the blood, floating around looking for a home and the end result isn’t pretty. [Note: I’m following Dr. Jason Fung who wrote several books, among them, The Obesity Code, The Diabetes Code and The Complete Guide to Fasting. He’s also on YouTube with many videos explaining intermittent fasting and the science behind it.] What I learned to do this year is to stop snacking and eat only at set times. I started intermittent fasting with a 18/6 schedule where I would eat only between 10 am and 4 pm. After I got used to it, I would go on a 24 hr fast two days a week. Go from 10 am to 4 pm as usual, and the next day, not eat until 4 pm. Resume the following day from 10 am to 4 pm. Eventually, I want to get to 42 hours where I can go from 4 pm, skip an entire day, and resume at 10 am. But I would only do this once or twice a month. I’ve already dropped all the weight I gained over the holidays, and I only wish I’d known about this technique earlier. Of course, I’m not sabotaging myself by overeating during my eating windows, and I’m not eating sugar or junk food because I don’t want to stimulate insulin. But I’m glad I’m going back to my roots. No snacking and no nibbling. I want my body to swing between “grow” and “burn” mode evenly, the way God designed us to be.

Well, these are the new things I tried out last year that worked for me. I hope I didn’t bore you, but I will continue to live and learn as long as the good Lord allows me to.

Please check out my Birthday Email chock full of giveaways, freebies, and discounted paperbacks by clicking/tapping on this link or the banner below, and I wish you all the best in living and learning in 2022.

https://www.rachelleayala.net/so/70NvFNBsN?languageTag=en