At Christmas, a friend gave me a copy of Stephen King’s new novel, 11.22.63.  Unwrapping it, I experienced a bit of a flutter of excitement.  Even though my to-read stack is tall, I wanted to jump to this one.  I’m sure you know the feeling.  Some books you open with cautious curiosity, some with a degree of resignation, others with clear eyes and genuine anticipation.  I recently saw something that brought back that feeling in a distilled jolt, kind of like snacking a taste of tomato paste or sugar syrup.  It was a photograph of an old Space Invaders arcade game cabinet, circa 1979.  The sight of that dark cabinet festooned with flying saucers and shambling, apish aliens jerked back thirty-year-old feelings of sweaty-palmed excitement; the nervous-legged, dry-mouthed anticipation that I suppose is something like an addict must feel when he knows satiation is nearby.

For anyone born after the golden age of arcade games, the idea that a seven-foot-tall cabinet with a TV tube and a joystick touched by hundreds of spotty teenagers could set your heart thudding must seem … well, alien.  Today, the iPhone app store presents me with literally thousands of games that I have to wait exactly zero seconds at all to buy.  Back in 1979, there were maybe a half dozen arcade games – Asteroids, Phoenix, and king-of-kings Space Invaders.  It cost 20 cents to play a game – and to do so you’d have to muscle in past all the other kids wanting to play and place your coin amongst others in a row on the screen to stake your claim.  For an unco like me, that 20 cents would buy me approximately twelve seconds before GAME OVER cut another wedge out of my spindle-legged ego.  I remember a holiday at a caravan park with two of my sisters, and the park had a games room where The Game waited for its worshippers.  I lay awake thinking about it, and when I slept, I dreamed of it.  It is, today, the most boring and tedious game imaginable.  Then, it ruled.  In Japan it caused shortages in 100-yen coins.  It was new.

Recently on TedTalks, I saw Clay Shirky explaining why US Congress’s SOPA bill was a bad idea.  He talked about the changes in media content that began about the same time as Space Invaders was dragging teenaged boys into dark, cathode ray-lit caves.  Shirky said that the 20^th century was a great time to be making television shows because your show didn’t have to be “better than all other TV shows ever made; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time.”  To get tens of millions of viewers, they didn’t have to be astonishing; they simply had to not suck too badly.  Shirky goes on to say how things began to change rapidly with the advent of VCRs, and the Internet created a whole new ballgame.  Now, a new TV show really does have to compete with every TV show ever made.  On just one device (my Apple TV) I can tonight choose to watch a new episode of Homeland, a 1955 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, or almost anything in between.

Although it is not strictly analogous, the world of publishing feels kind of like the same boat in the same whirlpool.  When I was in my formative reading years in secondary school (about the same time when my dreams were happily haunted by descending digital aliens) my choices of reading material seemed small.  Certainly, there was a school library full of books, ditto council libraries (scratch bookstores – I was spending all my cash on arcade games, remember?), but there were only a few dozen titles that really grabbed me.  The arrival of a new Philip Jose Farmer or Michael Moorcock was an event that got the heart racing like … well, like Space Invaders.  Today, with ebooks and audio books and online shopping, the world of literature – all of history’s literature – is just a few finger taps away.  The list of classics which I want to catch up on numbers in the many dozens (no, I haven’t yet read Rabbit, Run or The Continental Op; fail), let alone the hundreds of new titles that fall into my wishing bowl every month.  Great sites like Goodreads throw up dozens of suggestions daily.  And these are just above the radar titles; think of the thousands – the tens of thousands – of indie and self-published titles that get a little less exposure.  Basically, anyone with a smart phone and a Twitter account is an author.  How do you choose?  How does anyone choose?

As a reader, I try to strike a balance between the tried-and-true authors I know and enjoy, established authors I know by reputation, new authors who’ve reviewed well, and books I’ve not tried before but a trusted friends recommend.  As an author, I try not to think about it.  Publishers do all they can, but I’m sure there are moments they feel the same: boats in chaotic waters, trying to steer while titanic currents and lashing winds take them … somewhere.

So, I write.  I write, and trust what I write is good.  Certainly, I write with the hope that someone, somewhere, is anticipating my next book with at least a small portion of the excitement with which I anticipated that next Farmer or Moorcock or Stephen R. Donaldson, and with which I’m looking forward to 11.22.63: the same flutter-thrill that flew back from 1980 when I saw that Space Invaders photograph. But I write in the real hope I’ll surprise myself, and the words and characters will take over and take me somewhere I haven’t been before.  Somewhere new. That’s what good writing does – even when the setting is utterly familiar, even when the author is holding up a mirror to her city or his country or our world, the words lift a veil and shine a light and make us suck in our breath in surprise and stay awake long after bedtime.  It’s the thrill of discovery. It’s why I read, and it’s why I write.

It’s been a busy year, finishing and releasing a new novel, completing a sizable work project for one client and a steady stream of consultancy from others.  So it was a quiet delight at the weekend to get into my workshop under the house with the excuse of ‘tidying up’.

There is something very comforting about entering the space where I keep my tools.   I don’t need a particular job to hand to feel like I’m spending time in a worthwhile fashion – just rifling through the odd toolbox, pulling some tools out, sorting them, checking the edges on plane blades and chisel ends and drill bits is enough.  I don’t know how people without workshops cope.   Maybe a musician gets the same feelings of ease when she enters her music room, and an accomplished swimmer also experiences a sense of great comfort when he walks along the concourse toward the diving blocks he’s sprung from for years.  Even though I don't get much time at it, I love having a workbench.  And sorting my tools at the weekend was an even more important a job, because my collection was added to significantly some months ago.

My father always said that one day,his tools would be mine.  I always felt that ‘one day’ would never come, but it did early this year.  Now, with a large tool box that was always Dad’s now sitting in my workshop, the proof he’s gone is inescapable.  But it’s not sad.  There are tools I recognise from when I used to watch him use from when I was a toddler, working weekends building a new trellis or enclosing a room or opening up a verandah.

The electric tools I remember from my childhood have all failed and been dumped over the years, but the hand tools remain: the braces and bits, the bottle jack, the keyhole saw, the saw tooth setter, the raggling chisels, the shellite burner.  Should the electricity go off forever, I have tools sufficient to build an entire house; yes, it would take a lot longer (and with me behind them, a wonky house it would be) but it could be done.

Dad saw the passing of the horse-and-sulky and the explosive growth of the motorcar, the progression of aeroplanes from flimsy biplanes to supersonic jets, the immediate after effects of the First World War and, firsthand, the effects of the Second.  He grew up listening to a wireless, was nearly forty when television arrived in our country, and was near retirement when computers took off in the workplace. He lived without ever owning a computer. True, he had trouble setting the date on his digital watch, but he could calculate accurate timber lengths to the sixteenth of an inch in his head.  I work to base ten and need a calculator. 

A world without computers seems inconceivable, now, yet it worked and worked well.  My household has two Macbooks, two iPhones and an iPad … and yet I always still like to leave the house with a handkerchief and enough silver in my pocket to make a payphone call.  Silly, I know, and showing a remarkable distrust of both tissues and mobile phone networks.  This caution about radiowaves (bolstered by many years fighting lousy of mobile phone reception and inconsistent home WiFi) has extended into e-readers.  I own an iPad but still don't use it for reading.  I have considered buying a Kindle, but haven't yet.  I still love to hold and read a printed book.  I appreciate a book's robustness, the feel and smell of the paper, the small marks left by other readers if I bought it secondhand.  I remember the thrill of seeing the final cover art for The Dead Path when it was emailed to me, but that feeling paled compared with holding the printed book in my hands.  Books, like tools, have purpose and personality.  They have the ability to hold not just ink, but a sense of history.  Finding a well-loved book in a box brings delighted feelings that I just can't summon when scrolling through, say, the audiobooks I have on iTunes.

I am not a Luddite.  I love new technology and the freedoms it can bring.  I have used laser levels and power drills and electronic stud finders.  But I am glad I know how to use a water level, a brace and bit, and how to tap gently to find the hidden timbers.  Wasted knowledge, perhaps. Printed books may become quaint memories.  It might take ten years, or thirty.  But I hope someone, somewhere, keeps the printing presses stored safely.

Maybe Dad’s generation wasn’t the one that bridged the old world and the new; maybe it is mine.  Or maybe it's just me.