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 20th 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.