WAIHEKE AND ROCKY BAY DO NOT EXIST!

In 1642 Abel Tasman was the first to put pen to paper and make a map of any part of New Zealand. In 1769 James Cook was the first to make a complete map of the country, albeit from sea. New Zealand dates its founding as a nation from the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and the native Maoris in 1840.

But 370 years after Tasman, 243 years after Cook, and 172 years after the Treaty, New Zealand still does not have a complete official map. With GPS we can found out where we are in any place in the country to within centimetres, but there are tens of thousands places whose names we do not know, at least officially. Officially they do not exist.

For a placename to be official in New Zealand it must have been approved and gazetted by the New Zealand Geographic Board. But the Board has done that for only 7500 names. Important ones, such as Wellington (New Zealand's capital city), Auckland (its biggest city), North Island, South Island, etc., etc.,--tens of thousands of names have yet to be placed officially on the map.

(Actually 'North Island' has been gazetted, but not for the North Island of the country, the northernmost of its three main islands where most of the population lives; only for some obscure little dot in the Mutton Bird islands in Fouveaux Strait way down near the southernmost tip of New Zealand!!! So to be strictly legal you cannot say that Auckland and Wellington and many other places are in the North  Island, because they are not on that tiny Mutton Bird island--nor could they be: they cannot fit.)

Everyone, surely, has the right to live in a place that has an official name. Otherwise you cannot have an address, an identifiable property, no one can find you, emergency services may not be able to serve you, your mail may never come or go astray, etc.

There are three categories of names in New Zealand: official (gazetted), unofficial ('recorded'), and neither. 'Recorded' only means that the Geographic Board is of the opinion that a name has been mentioned at least twice on what it regards as an authorative map or database, but it has yet to be officially approved and recognised. It does not officially exist in law.

'Waiheke Island' is only recorded, and therefore has no official legal status. 'Rocky Bay', despite the fact that it has appeared on many maps and databases since at least 1877 has not even been recorded.

That is why at last night's meeting of the Waiheke Local Board I sought its support for putting Rocky Bay on the map. What follows is the written submission made to the board, which was supported by copies of old maps held in the Auckland War Museum Library that are too big to be shown here.


REQUEST TO THE WAIHEKE LOCAL BOARD
TO SUPPORT AN APPLICATION TO THE NEW ZEALAND GEOGRAPHIC BOARD
TO APPROVE AND GAZETTE FOUR WAIHEKE PLACENAMES

* Omiha/Rocky Bay as the dual name of that village.
* Omiha Bay/Rocky Bay as the dual name of that bay.
* Whakanewha Bay as the name of the bay on the edge of Whakanewha Regional Park
* Omiha Point as the name of the unnamed point at the northern end of Rocky Bay

Wendy Shaw, the Secretary of the New Zealand Geographic Board, told me in early July this year that only 16,000 placenames in New Zealand have been approved and gazetted by the Board, a further 35,000 have been recorded (acknowledged but not approved and gazetted), which leaves an unknown number in neither category. But in fact the Geographic Board's website lists only 7500 that have been approved and gazetted. 'Wellington' and 'Auckland' are just two of myriads that have yet to be approved and gazetted--but the North Shore suburb of Chatswood has been! It is very disappointing to find that in 2012 this country has such a mess of a map.

Included in the myriads in that third-level Black Hole is Rocky Bay as the name of the bay and the village, and Whakanewha Bay.

The system operated by the New Zealand Geographic Board is cumbersome. The application form is not well designed, a separate application must be made for every name (even when approval is being sought for a clutch of names in common use, and even if those have been recorded), and the Board meets only a few times a year, and may defer decisions indefinitely. So the process can be long and tedious.

The Waiheke Community Board has received an odd letter from the Geographic Board about a straightforward application that was made a year ago. The wording is odd, and the determination is quite wrong because the Board's advisors misread the application, which was for what heads these notes--for dual names. But they misread it as an application to replace Omiha Bay with Rocky Bay.

Many problems can of course be caused by wrong names on maps, and when names have not been gazetted, or even recorded, there is no authoritative source to correct errors. Therefore names in common daily use, even ones with a long and authoritative provenance, may be rejected by officialdom, which can cause day-to-day problems and may make emergencies more dangerous.

The worst day-to-day problems I have personally experienced were caused by the fact that New Zealand Post refuses to recognise placenames that have not been gazetted or recorded. 

In Rocky Bay only 'Omiha' has any kind of recognition, because it has been recorded, although not gazetted. None of the names sought here have been gazetted.

Starting in 2008 I had contact with a David Wilson, who glories in the title of Senior Addressing Support Analyst at New Zealand Post and sets the rules for addressing mail. He refuses to allow Rocky Bay, because it is neither recorded nor gazetted, and he enforces his rule with they threat of disqualification for the bulk-mailing discount. His reach is long and wide, and includes overseas entities such as National Geographic and Dell. So if people who live in Rocky Bay fill in their address as 'Rocky Bay' they are very likely to find it changed to Omiha. That caused me a nasty problem when Dell sent some expensive hardware that never arrived. Dell clearly thought that I had received them, and was lying to get them without fulfilling my side of the bargain. I finally tracked them down gathering dust in a bin somewhere in Christchurch, which also has an Omiha. On that occasion I knew that mail had gone astray. Very often we would not. How much has, and for how many people, is impossible to tell. 

At one stage I was even disenfranchised--removed from the electoral roll--because of the compulsion organisations are put under by the Post Office, and the electoral computer would not accept my address.

But regardless of such problems it is clearly most unsatisfactory to have a situation where well-established placenames are not recognised, not approved, not gazetted, and therefore rejected by various officials. So I ask the Waiheke Local Board to support this application to the New Zealand Geographic Board.

As you can see from the historical maps supplied to me by Paul Monin who got them from the Auckland War Memorial Museum Library, 'Rocky Bay' for the bay, 'Omiha' for the village area, and 'Whakanewha Bay' for the big bay along the edge of Whakanewha Regional Park, all have provenance going back at least as far as 1877.

The Honourable Sandra Lee says 'Omiha' was a Maori princess from another tribe who was captured by the tribe that lived in Rocky Bay and subsequently married a man from it, which reconciled the two tribes. We should obviously honour that positive heritage.

In law New Zealand has three official languages, including English and Maori of course, and therefore with that dual historical provenance it is fitting to have dual English and Maori names. For the bay itself, Rocky Bay has provenance going back to at least 1877, and Omiha Bay has been recorded in recent times. It would therefore be proper to gazette both of them. Then Post Office bureaucrats would have to accept Rocky Bay, and there could be no valid confusion in the emergency services. Whakanewha Bay also has provenance back to at least 1877. And naming the unnamed point at the northern end of Omiha Bay/Rocky Bay as Omiha Point would further honour the much older Maori provenance (Sandra says it goes back centuries).

Then Rocky Bay would be officially gazetted twice: as the English name of the village and the English name of the bay. And Omiha would officially be in the area four times: gazetted as the Maori name of the village and the bay and the name of its northern point, as well as in Omiha Road.

Obviously there are many placenames on the island that must be officialised until every single one has been put firmly on the map, but this four-fold application for Rocky Bay is as good a place as any to start, and a start on it has already been made, and therefore it needs only the Local Board's approval to continue to its proper, gazetted conclusion.

Then Rocky Bay and Whakanewha Bay will be up there with Chatswood and Rat Island...

.......

Update: That was the grand plan. But the Waiheke Local Board proved itself incapable of making such a simple, obvious decision, pulled the old trick of asking for 'officials' to make a report, got the do-nothing report it wanted, and decided to do that. Nothing. So we remain down there, with the nameless rats: the bureauc-rats.

A DOVE CHICK IN WINTER!

When I went out into the forest this morning I was as usual soon surrounded by many doves wanting to be fed, but to my surprise from somewhere in the midst of the flight I could hear the plaintive sounds of a chick. In winter!? But after a time I managed to look at it closely enough for long enough to see that its ceres were pink, so it is definitely a chick (ceres are the bulges at the top of the beak, and in doves they are pink in chicks then turn whitish when when the birds mature)

A chick in July! How did its parents keep the egg then the new-hatched unfledged youngster warm enough for it to survive!?

Later when I went into my office the adult female that I have named Placida because she has such placid nature came in too, and after pecking about for a while flew up to the fax-machine for a snooze as is her habit.

After about twenty minutes she started looking about, which usually means she wants to go outside, so I opened the outside door for her. She ignored it, but another dove took the opportunity to come in. When I closed the door that one took off and flew round my office, beautifully fluttering with tail spread, but not like any other dove had ever done when inside. This one was flying high up near the ceiling, and the way she was her flying was different. When she landed on something high up I saw to my surprise that it was the chick. So already she is tame enough to come inside. (I presume she is a female)

When she came down, she busied herself with studying her new environment, but she was not very nervous, and when I opened the door she calmly made her way out.

Placida is still here as I write this two hours later, dividing her time between snoozing and attending to her feathers and exploring the floor to try to find something to eat.

So there must now be twenty-one doves in my part of this great forest, because there have been twenty adults many times recently in the mornings and today there were nineteen plus the chick, so there was an adult missing.

If this flight of doves have begun breeding and multiplying this early I can expect to be overwhelmed by them by the end of the summer. Twenty-one could easily become twice or thrice as many. What a delightful fate--to be overwhelmed by doves!

CAT TERROR LASTS BUT FADES

The terror of that black cat that has been lurking close to the doves upset them for a long time. The number coming down each morning had settled down to twenty after a mother and chick had died from some fatal malady and a third one had vanished, I presume the mate of the dead mother and dead from the same cause, but when the cat scared the whole flight several times, even getting as close as half a metre from them, that number dropped dramatically, and they all became very skittish, easily terrified into fleeing back to the trees (a flight is the collective noun for a group of doves)

Any black shape would do it--even a blackbird in the gloom of the forest floor in the morning would panic at least one and they would all take off. The reason for their flight was not superb, but they did look superb: a cloud of doves flying upwards, almost from under my feet, white wings beating in the forest.

But on Friday (yesterday), for the first time in nearly a month, there were twenty again. That was a relief, because it proved that the cat has yet not managed to catch one. I had thought that was so, because there were no feathers scattered about anywhere, but it was good to see them all back, despite the fact that the latecomers were still rather uncertain.

As I write this there are two pecking about in my office.

One is one that was absent for a time. It has the amusing habit of asking for more--and specifying what it wants. It comes up to me and coos 'More' when it wants something or wants something it likes better than what it already has. If you give it more of the same, or has not finished what it already has, it ignores it, protests with more cooing, and is only satisfied when it gets what it wants. Then it will ask for something it likes even better.

It first preference is bits of dried fruit from Hubbard's Very Fruitful Breakfast, its second is the ground oats body of the same thing, and third is Quick Oats. Coo! I call it RedFeet because it one of the two that has redder feet. The other red-footed one was one that was timid for a time and has acquired a brown stain down its breast, so it is Timidity Brown or Timidity Red.

The other one in my office is snoozing under my chair. She is keeping away from RedFeet because they argue over territory and food.

But it is hard to sound extremely angry at another bird when all you can do is coo, so dovish arguments are rather tame--although when they get mad they will pull out small feathers from round the neck and breast of their opposition. Or wap each other with their wings, which is like being hit with a feather duster.

Excuse me, RedFeet wants to go out. She went and stood by the door, which is her way of saying, 'I want to go outside now.' One or two others do the same. Some say the same thing by flying up to something and looking about for the exit.

Reading the minds of doves...

SEXUAL ABUSE ENTRENCHED IN NZ

Sexual abuse across all social classes by men and women, boys and girls, well- and poorly-educated, is deeply embedded in New Zealand society, and despite being explicitly outlawed in public places by section 4 of the Summary Offences Act 1981 it is everywhere considered so normal and acceptable that any law against it is a dead letter.

If a black man is punched in the head because he is black, that is racial abuse of the physical kind. If he is called a nigger, that is racial abuse of the psychological kind. Everyone understands that. Both are acts of racial abuse, both hit him hard in his mind and heart, and both damage both the abused and the abuser.

Words are powerful. The words we use, the words we choose, express our thinking and shape it. Then our thinking shapes our actions.

What are inaccurately and euphemistically called four-letter words, which Tolkien aptly called Black Speech, is sexual abuse of the psychological kind. It pours black abuse on the emblems and the essence of manhood and boyhood, girlhood and womanhood. Especially manhood and boyhood. Even a term that on the surface abuses women‘s genitals is most often hurled at men by men: the c-- word is the worst insult that can be flung at a man; it says he has no manhood.

The destructive power of the black words is multiplied by the fact that they do double duty as terms of strong mockery. For example, the black word for the penis also means a stupid fool, the black word for the glans penis means a very stupid fool, the black word for the testes is part of a term that means a gross and mindless blunder, the black abbreviation for the scrotum means something disgusting and repellent. Boys and men thus constantly have rammed into them the message that what makes and marks them as male is a disgusting and repellent joke. That is a monumental lie.

Women get off comparatively lightly, but it is small wonder that breast-feeding is rejected by so many when the word used for the breasts also means a stupid mistake. That too is a destructive lie.

The f--- word, when made personal with 'you', is a wish for what is obviously thought to be the worst punishment that can be inflicted. As rape yes, but it abuses the most loving act in human life, a damnable lie underscores the rest of the abuse.

Until New Zealand recognises that it is subjecting itself to a torrent of psychological sexual abuse in its addiction to Black Speech and starts eliminating it the physical sexual abuse that arises from it will continue.

For a start, section 4 of the Summary Offences Act 1981 should be rigorously enforced. Which means that police officers must stop using sexually abusive language. Radio and television should eliminate it from the airwaves, and if an otherwise worthwhile programme that includes is shown it it should be preceded by a clip that says what it contains and that it is sexual abuse so must be treated with contempt--in short, the abusive guns should be spiked. The Broadcasting Standards Authority should recognise and fulfil its responsibilities.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which New Zealand has signed, and which it affirmed in our Bill of Rights Act in 1990, lays down the fundamental principle of law as 'recognition of the inherent dignity and worth of the human person.' Together with 'recognition of the equal and inalienable worth of all members of the human family' that is *explicitly defined* as 'the foundation of freedom justice and peace in the world.' So in law and in truth whenever we denigrate our inherent dignity and worth we threaten our freedom, our justice, our peace.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says 'disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind'. That is always so. Therefore to eliminate the barbarism of sexual abuse and assault we must eliminate the contempt that leads to them. Which includes the contempt pouring like black pus from countless conversations.

It is simple cause and effect. That which is held in contempt will inevitably be attacked. There are attacks for good and attacks for evil. Evil attacks are caused by evil contempt. To eliminate them, it is necessary to eliminate the evil contempt. How is evil contempt recognised? It shuns the truth.

We recognise the arrant falsehoods of sexually abusive actions and images, but although the country is drenched in sexually abusive language few recognise it and care. The daily barrage of falsehoods about what makes and marks us as male and female, and which constantly drives down our self-esteem, male self-esteem in particulary, must be recognised for what it is and ruthlessly stamped out. We must accept and honour our bodies, not denigrate them.

When we tell falsehoods to ourselves about ourselves we act falsely to ourselves and others.The only difference is a matter of degree. In some the manifestation is extreme: rape and rape-murder. In others it is poor treatment of themselves and others, especially by men of women. Everyone who uses Black Speech is responsible for the damage it causes.

As W.H. Auden wisely observed:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn.
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

GOOGLE PLUS

There has been a great deal of hype and hoo-ha about Facebook recently, but those of us who have discovered Google Plus know how much better than Facebook it is. Unfortunately, we cannot delete ourselves from Facebook, only render our accounts inactive, but mine has been zapped and I shall never go back.

Google Plus, Google+, G+ has been well named. It is a plus in every way. It has a simple interface that is a delight to use, every aspect is easy to configure (including privacy), and the brilliant concept of Circles fits perfectly the way we arrange our lives.

On Facebook everyone is a 'friend.' That is silly. 'Friend' is a precious word that cannot and should not be applied to hordes of people.

But on Google+ you have Circles. You can call them whatever you please, and put whoever you please into them. You get a few Circles to start you off: Family, Friends, Acquaintances, Following. You can drag people into those ones, you can create new ones, you can rename any Circle any time. You can have oodles of them.

And the people you put in your Circles only know that they are in one, or more, of your Circles. They do not know which one.So you could have a Circle you called Ratbags of the Universe, or Best Photographers in the World, or Rocket Scientists, or Fellow Waihekeans, Sweeties, or whatever is appropriate, and put people there. You just enter names, and drag their pictures into a Circle or Circles (people can be in multiple Circles).

Postings on Google+, unlike on Facebook, can be edited, so if you made a typing error, or just want to change or add something, you can. And you can make them as long or short as you please. You can of course add pictures, videos, text, links.

And there are Ripples, where you see, live, how postings are rippling across G+ as people share them.

Then there are Hangouts. You can get together with up to nine other people on your webcams. You can jump from a posting directly to a Hangout if you want to change from postings to a live meeting about that post. And Hangouts on Air enable you to broadcast to the world on YouTube, which is also part of Google and is integrated with Google+. As are GMail and Google Search and other Google stuff.

When you go on to Google+ that black bar at the top of your browser changes. Your name, with a + in front, is added at the left-hand end. So that is what Google+ means, Google plus You. Everyone on Google+ is Plusser.

I could go on and on. But if you are on Facebook not Google+ you are using a second-rate service. Third rate, or worse.

It has been going less than a year but is already heading to towards 200 million users. It took FB eight years to get the 900 million it claims to have. I hope that does not count my deactivated account...

Google search is used by two-thirds of the 2.3 billion users of the Internet. So which will win? Google+ or Facebook? The best, of course...

To join Google+ click here

Or just click on the +You link at the left-hand end of the black bar at the top of your browser (assuming you have Google as your homepage).


.....


Footnote, made in May 2013. Google+ used to exhibit good design, which made it a pleasure to use. But then to my dismay it did a revamp and ditched so much good design and displayed so much insensitivity to how the human mind works that I ditched it. No more Google Plus. Which is a pity, because the G+ idea is superb, but I cannot stand bad design. And I have far more interesting things to do, things that do not involve being constantly annoyed by foolish shortcomings. G+ is becoming as dictatorial and take-or-leave it as Facebully. So I chose to leave it. My account remains, to be a point of contact, but I do not.

BLACK CAT AT THE DOVES

Doves belong to the pigeon family, and 'Putting a cat among the pigeons' is an old saying, often expressed as a bit of a joke. But it is no joke when you find a black cat from somewhere has tried to sneak up on the doves that thought my place was safe.

A sudden loud flurry of dovish wings panicking outside the office caught my attention this afternoon, and I went out, to see a sinister black shape retreating behind a tree only a couple of metres from where the birds had been feeding on the ground.

Now the birds are nervous and easily spooked. They are wary about coming down to the ground, and when one panics they all flee back up to the trees, even though there is no cat..

A few weeks ago there were twenty-three, but two died, a mother and chick, and I think that whole family must have succumbed to whatever it was they had eaten or whatever bug they had caught, or perhaps the father went elsewhere to seek a new mate, so that reduced the flight* to twenty. But now it is a very wary twenty. :-(

The tamest one, the female I call LightFeet, has been getting very, very tame, even perching on my shoulder for and hour or two while I worked. I hope she will not be affected by the coming of the black cat, that the general wariness of the flight will soon dissipate, and that that cat will exit the scene permanently.

(*The collective noun for doves is a flight.)

LOVE IN THE FOREST

Birds grow up at astonishing speed. If we were the same we would complete our entire education and be married in six months flat.

The photo shows two doves that were eggs only a few months ago. Now they are fully grown and have chosen a mate. The one with the well-feathered feet I have dubbed BigFeet2, because the feathers make her feet look big (I think she is a female), and because there is another dove amongst the twenty-one that now live in this forest that also has well-feathered feet, albeit not so much, but was born before BigFeet2, which I call BigFeet1.

The photo shows the male bird (if I am right about gender) grooming his beloved.

My guess about their genders is based on seeing BigFeet2 mounted by her mate. That seems conclusive, but BigFeet2 also does the cooing and bowing behaviour typical of males, although that may only be the warning cooing that means 'Move over, that food is mine!' But I expect they know which is which, and there will in due course be eggs then the flutter of smaller wings.

As I write this the pair are wandering, and occasionally flying, round my office.

But a few days later, as if they knew my doubts about their genders and wanted to put me right, they made their beautiful fluttering unions three times on the floor of my office, and BigFeet2 was on top every time. So he is a he. And his mate spends more time grooming him that he spends on her, which makes it conclusive.
:-)

TWENTY-THREE THEN TWENTY-ONE

Up till  the 10th of March the greatest number of doves I had seen on the ground at the same time was twenty-three, although the usual maximum to fly down from the trees in the morning to feed on the ground and from my hands was twenty-two.

That was haw many there were on the morning of the 9th, but two were noticeably off-colour. They were hunched down, not eating with the rest and looked very sleepy. The other twenty were their normal vigorous selves. At night I saw that two were hunched together well under the office part of the building, and in the morning to my dismay one was dead. The other one, a fairly recent chick, died a few hours later despite my attempts to revive it. I assume the first one was its mother. Perhaps she ate something she should not have, such as a poisonous karaka berry, and passed it on to her chick in her 'milk'. I buried them in the forest at the foot of large boulder--Dove Rock as I call it.

So now, somewhere round here, there are twenty-one doves but since that day no more than twenty have arrived on the ground at once.  

NINETEEN!

For the second time this week there were nineteen doves waiting for me when I opened the door at seven o'clock. Nineteen little white angels, with angel wings spread, making a concerted rush to get inside, eager to be fed on the little bits of cheese I was holding in both hands.

It is very hard to get out a door when there is a mass of white wings and feathered bodies trying their best to get in. But a very nice way to start the day.

Then when I bent down and opened my hands I had the usual exuberant, eager mass of angel wings beating round me. Wonderful!

TOLKIEN'S BIRTHDAY AND BOOKS

Today is Tolkien's 119th birthday, or as he would put it his eleventy-ninth.

Yesterday I ordered the proof of The Wing-Friends, an enchanting fantasy set in the ancient past that I wrote many years ago. Dorothy Butler liked it, and thought it should be published, but the publisher did not think there was enough of a market in New Zealand, so now it is being published by CreateSpace, part of Amazon. The process is very straightforward, the proof reached first-approval stage quickly and the physical book will be in my hands shortly. Once that has been checked and signed off it goes out all over the planet.

The greatest compliment ever paid it was by Dorothy Butler. I had reason to contact her many years later over someone else's book, and asked if she remembered mine. Yes, she did. A memorable story is always the best kind. I hope others find it as appealing.

Meanwhile my eBooks have continued to sell well on Amazon's Kindle Store, even when their promotion days ended, About 1500 copies so far in less than a week. The short horror-story, The Thing, is going like a rocket to my astonishment. A lot of people must like a bit of gross terror, or perhaps they see that it is like the real world: get it horribly wrong and things go horribly wrong for slightly more than 3 nanoseconds.

I am particularly pleased about my 10,000-word novelette Loving Minds, another fantasy, but a modern one. It was to a large extent inspired by a conversation I found myself next to on the Jet Raider ferry one night. It melded with other thoughts and imaginings and Loving Minds was the result. The sort of romance that can really only be dreamed of...

MY BOOKS AND STORIES PUBLISHED!

Over the years I have written a huge amount--millions of words of one sort or another--ranging from professional writing in information technology, business and science, to children's and adult fiction, to legal opinions, to blogs, etc. The fiction has covered a very wide range, from fantasy to horror, from romance to humour, from metaphor and environmental activism to classic tales reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Tolkien.

Some of my stories are very short, some are full-length books; they vary in length from a mere 360 words on a single page to over 33,000 on 84 pages. But 360 words can be just as compelling as a much longer work. The length should be whatever it comes out to; it should fit the story. The 360-word work is a horror-story, whose brevity heightens the horror (and the black humour).

None of my stories have been published (on paper, I mean), either because I made no attempt, or as was the case with my first book, a fantasy called The Wing-Friends, because although the publishers liked it they declined it. They liked it because their reader, the famous Dorothy Butler, recommended it, but they did not think there was a big enough market in my native New Zealand to make it worth their while. The opinions of publishers are the bane of author's lives...

How many times in history have books been declined by publishers, or only published in very limited numbers, because publishers did not think they would be successful, but then were runaway best-sellers, never out of print? The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Lord of the Rings are two of myriads of examples.

To get round that, the ideal is be your own publisher but traditionally that has meant a large initial outlay because of the cost of a print-run and marketing. Print-on-demand publishing, in which copies are printed only when ordered, opened large cracks in that obstacle, but although the outlay was not as large it was still not an easy road, especially if you had a number of works to publish.

In the past few days I have discovered, rather belatedly to my chagrin, that Amazon has swept away all obstacles with free services, both ebook and print-on-demand. The ebooks are published via Kindle Direct Publishing; the print-on-demand are published via a part of the Amazon empire called CreateSpace. The Internet has radically changed the author's world. Yay! No longer do publishers have the whip hand, or any hand at all. Now the author is in charge, and has a direct line to readers. Which is how things should be.

So I have started publishing a number of my stories myself. The shorter ones are or will be in ebook format, for reading on an electronic reader or a computer. The longer ones will be in print-on-demand paperback format.

To find my stories go to Amazon and enter my name in the search box: Nobilangelo Ceramalus, or just Nobilangelo, or click on this link. As the days go more and more will be there. so far I have published seven ebooks. Soon I shall publish my first print-on-demand book, The Wing-Friends. I also plan to publish an environmental book, The Earth-Guard, via print-on-demand, as well as other things in both formats, about a dozen all together perhaps.

The exclamation mark at the end of the title of this posting is therefore an indication of my relief at being able at long last to get my stories out into the world where they belong.

I hope there will be people who will enjoy them.