UPDATE: The winner is…Mary Preston!
*~*~*

My Summers are usually filled with author signings, the coordination and travel to get to them, time spent with readers and other authors, and writing deadlines. It’s an intense, hectic, wonderful few months.

This Summer, however, my plans were oddly absent. Signing Season happened during the Spring months instead, and I made no firm writing deadlines because I was uncertain what I wanted to write after my May release of What a Dragon Loves completed my Star of the North series about four Viking Dragon Shifter brothers born in Minnesota, saving the world, falling in love, and saying you betcha.

As Summer loomed, I had no idea what I would do with myself. I was rudderless and, honestly, floundering a little.

Then I scheduled the first of two hip replacement surgeries for early July.

Woah. Turns out the increasing leg pain I’d been suffering these past few years—so bad this last year that I could only get a few interrupted hours of sleep a night—was bone-on-bone arthritis in my hips. Huh. Who Knew? So, by the end of 2024, I’ll have new hips, no more pain, and (according to my hair stylist) bionic legs like the cyborgs in my Silver Cyborg series. 😉

I’m grateful to modern medicine for this new lease on my body, ensuring I can continue substitute teaching, walking around Disney World, standing at author signing events to chat with readers, and maybe even getting a full night’s sleep.

I’m also grateful that my short story, “What that Alien D Do,” was accepted into Delilah Devlin’s newest Boy’s Behaving Badly anthology. It means I can have an empty-ish author summer and still have a new book to celebrate. It also means I get to be part of an anthology filled with delightful stories by other amazing authors. I’ve been involved in the past few anthologies, and am always awe-struck by the variety of theme interpretations and quality of writing. I absolutely loooove gushing to readers about the fabulous stories in these anthologies and pointing out my favorites (which are rarely my own 😉

This year’s Secret Identity theme was a fun one. I’ve always wanted to write something set in a Con…a convention filled with people letting their inner geek flag fly through choice of clothing, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, props, etc. All that Cosplay, and its many sub-categories, allows people to showcase their creativity and hide themselves within a temporary persona.

Ooooor…

Does it actually allow them to express their true selves?

What if those Cons and all that Cosplay allowed non-human beings to hide in plain sight?

Who truly has the secret identity?

If you haven’t already, pre-order your copy of the Secret Identities today! And while you wait for it to go LIVE, I offer this contest…

Contest

For a chance at a $5 Amazon gift card, if money, time, and talent were no object, what/who would you Cosplay or dress up as?

About Ava

Ava Cuvay is an award-winning bestselling author of out of this world Sci-fi and Paranormal Romance featuring sassy heroines, gutsy heroes, passion, adventure… and the word “moist”. She resides in central Indiana with her own scruffy-looking nerfherder and teen kiddos who think her “Rizz” is “cringe” but she “passes the vibe check” and her books “hit different.” No cap. She believes life is too short to bother with negative people, everything is better with Champagne, and Han Solo shot first. Star Wars references are her love language.  https://avacuvay.com