Phew!

It's done - the manuscript of The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, co-edited by myself and P.S. Cottier, has been sent to the publishers. There's now what will doubtless be a fairly epic proofing process to go through, but it's a major milestone nevertheless.

It's been a massive job: reading submissions, finding previously published poems, coming up with longlists, coming up with shortlists, settling on the poems to include, dealing with publishing permissions, and doing everything else that goes with putting an anthology together.

It didn't really occur to me until I was making some late fixes to the Contributors' Notes that we have a very impressive lineup of poets in this anthology, most of whom I'd never heard of before work on the anthology began. I doubt that I'm the only New Zealand poet to have a very limited knowledge of Australian poetry: one of the pleasures of working on The Stars Like Sand has been getting to know the work of some tremendous Australian poets, and another has been the enjoyment of working with my most excellent co-editor.

One big deadline met. Now for all the little ones :-)