I think I’m okay in announcing that I’ve sold a new story to Chris Kelso and Hal Duncan’s Caledonia Dreamin’ anthology of ‘stories of Scottish descent’. The premise of the anthology is to showcase some of the incredible words available in the lexicon of the Scots language, re-purposing them for a wider and modern audience. The word I chose was wersh, and it’s put to use in a story of love, cultural displacement and boiled sweets. It’s also one of my ‘musicals’ stories, and the result is…yeah, I’m pretty proud of it.
With the BFA reading now in full swing, short stories are about all I have time to work on writing wise. Which is okay in one sense because I have a couple of challenges on the go that I’m playing catch-up on. But on the other hand I’m stockpiling ideas for the novels like there’s no tomorrow. Never happy us writers.
ayeahmur 
Congrats, Neil, have to admit I’ve never heard of “wersh”, I went for “sleekit”, “stramash”, and “huntegowk” and since I’ve heard nought, I’m assuming I’ve crashed and burned with all three, Well done, that’s another launch at the World Fantasy Convention in October.
Cheers, Ian. Those are great words. Have no idea what stage the editors are at with replies, I got mine verbally and I might be jumping the gun in announcing it (actually I hadn’t meant to publish the post so soon, but something went wrong with the scheduling (ie I chose today’s date instead of further in the future)).
Aye, there’ll be a lot of good launches at WFC!