I'm privileged to work in my own office in long black alley, aka Vulcan Lane, in downtown Auckland. For the record I work in something one could loosely call 'new media', which in reality means creating content for world wide web sites on the Internet. I've been in Vulcan Lane for two out of the eight years I've been in New Zealand.

Before that I sat in an old first floor shoe box hanging off a tumbled, and often distressed villa in Parnel, trying to make a living as a free lance writer. I'd been there since, when aged 40, I arrived in Aotearoa still chasing dreams ­ but with a difference. This time, in changing everything by switching hemispheres, I had also, quite self-consciously clicked another switch. Instead of waiting for the space to appear, I decided I would just sit down in it.

In the forty years preceding my discovery that John Knox had long since beat me to New Zealand, my marked passages through the furrow marked 'paul reynolds', included sessions as a junior seminarian - school bursar - community worker - cricket groundsman - park keeper of Leister Square - jazz-pub manager - mature student - and finally, just to burn off a few memories, third-in-charge of a London hostel for homeless teenagers. Within and between these stages, I scribbled.

In short my 10 by 20 foot work room in Parnel was but the latest in long line of 'bubbles' I had created, the better to precipitate life into words.

In the sixties it had been both a bedsit in Battersea and a caravan in the overgrown gardens of an old Scottish country house. In the seventies it shifted to the spare room of a brand new town house in Ayrshire, part of the gloriously ambitious but ultimately doomed Glasgow diaspora called Irvine New Town.

For the whole of the eighties, everything moved to London - with the bubbles forming and bursting over a ten year re-invention that encompassed a spell as tenant of Charles, Philip, Arthur, George, Lord of the Isles, and Prince of Wales: as well as sundry licensed squats, mostly courtesy of Lambeth County Council - except for a curious and very ill advised body-swerve to a cottage on a blasted cliff half submerged by the North Sea.

But though every new bubble was different - to my astonishment every one of them produced a little spark of gold from something I had written, that even I was happy with. In the early days I called those rare moments 'the hit' , and quietly waited for its sequel, like a word junkie searching his horoscope for certainty, or his bookshelves for something to sell.

For all of us, but especially in the creative field, acknowledging that something of our own is 'good', is the hardest act of faith any of us can learn.

It's not just that it takes practice. All too often it involves dislocation, and movement, all from that compulsion to shift from the periphery to an imagined centre . In my case, London - where reading - writing - looking - listening - arguing - become conjoined with the metropolitan, as if the latter held some kind of key.

That this shift to the 'centre' comes from not having enough faith in your self goes without saying. We all know perfectly well that real progress can only happen back home in the bubble. Wherever that may be. Nevertheless, whether the whole idea of a 'center' might be nonsense, or not, knowing that genius might just be at work in the next street does help! Better still, when you get to see, hear, read, or look at a lot of other people's efforts, the sheer bulk of the experience hardens and objectifies your confidence as to what 'good' should look like.

All of which can be extraordinarily inspiring, provided you don't fall into the trap of sitting around just talking about what other people have done, and what you are going to do, instead of just doing it! Or worse still, be still stuck on the imagined periphery still convinced that 'good' is somewhere else.

Naturally I've discovered that New Zealand is far from immune from what is, by definition, a commonplace artistic neurosis. However, by virtue of it's physical isolation in the world, New Zealand is understandably afflicted with a more virulent version of the virus than most. And that must make life really hard, especially if you're convinced that 'good' is at the end of a 12 or 22 hour air-trip.

But though one of the great joys of my life is that I might just have figured out what 'good' looks like , an even bigger moment was when , in 1994, I first plugged a battered old 300 baud modem into and old 286PC and a telephone line, switched it on, and dialled into a local bulletin board.

Two minutes later, to my absolute astonishment, words started appearing on the screen which I hadn't typed.

What I had stumbled on was a discussion thread on the newsgroup hierarchy where unpublished writers were offering each other handy hints on who to offer their manuscripts to. Naturally most of it was hopelessly American, but even after all this time, it is very difficult for me to convey the sheer joy of that moment. It was as if a whole new peer group had suddenly knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to come out and play.

This feeling of possibility was immeasurably enhanced when I first saw the web browser Mosaic, and read the early attempts at publishing on the web through the limited , but nevertheless, intimidating HTML codes then available. At the time - and I make no apology whatsoever for this - as far as I was concerned I was looking at a publishing revolution, and I wanted to be in it, on it, and very much part of it. And if that meant learning some semi-literate computer codes, so be it.

In the four years since that moment I've seen the web colonised by everyone from the bank to the brothel, much of it accompanied by the heavy breathing of avarice. However, I've also seen whole libraries appear, databases opened up, and rich information seams beginning to appear; with the later often led, and financed, by professionals within mainstream business.

Best of all, though sometimes hiding in the cracks pretending they are not there, are artists, writers, designers, all hopelessly infested by what I call 'the worm' - that feeling in your stomach that only goes away when you create your own "good"!

For many of us, this worm is no metaphor, but a daily reality. But what really astonishes me is how slow some of my fellow sufferers have been to see the web as their natural home.

Take two examples. A few weeks ago, I sat in a pre-summer back garden. It was evening and the party indoors was building nicely. Outside a little group gathers. An Auckland based writer was adamant the Internet had nothing for her. It was full of rubbish, and if she put anything 'up there', it would be stolen. And anyway her stories wouldn't look right on a computer screen. She said all this with an embarrassed determination, looking slightly to the side for inspiration, or perhaps, escape. Then she got indignant. As well she might. After all, she had got herself published!

A week or so later - same sort of location, usual suspects - it was the turn of a young graphic designer, whose real passion was photography. She talked of her trip to India with a kind of golden respect. And yes, she very much planned to put the whole collection together as a book. She had even started laying it out on her computer. But no - she had no intention of 'putting it on the Internet' - computer graphics doesn't have the same texture, and it was all too slow, not 'good enough'

I find these kinds of reactions extraordinary. My author peer could have better paid work free-lancing on the net than she ever could scrubbing floors and so capture five 'real hours'. And if she took the trouble to join in, she just might find the emerging discussions and examples of narration, characterisations, and closure from a computer screen, absolutely fascinating.

Similarly, though she might be the most talented photographer to hit Auckland in a generation, its highly unlikely my designer friend will ever get a publisher 'interested in a book'. But none of this is part of my astonishment.

It's the way they 'look' at the Internet that confounds me. That in seeing it a an object , instead of a process in formation, they not only dismiss it's potential out of hand, they block an opportunity to discover more about themselves, and all the time the worm eats away, less and less content with the scraps it is given.

Meanwhile, a phone call away there is a whole new world - with a mile of work required from the talented and the afflicted. And this time we don't need a centre. The centre is the medium itself. We don't have to go chasing 'good'.

Good goes out - good comes in, literally staring us in the face. And the worm gets fed. Who needs an air-ticket!

Paul Reynolds < paulr@mcgovern.co.nz>