I thought of this the other day in conjunction with the overwhelm sweeping the world. Do people go to events any more? Do they buy things or take classes? Or is there so much out there that is free that it’s hard enough just to get noticed? So many books being published, so many blogs, so many online communities, messages, ideas, conversations, products, newsletters, notices . . . Aaaaah!

But what if turning on your computer is just like going to live in New York, except you don’t have to pay a stupid broker’s fee? New Yorkers–well, transplants, I mean–learn to live with the chaos, the thousand faces going by, the million opportunities, the overload of information. You have your people. I remember riding the subway with my friend Lisa, a long time New Yorker. She bumped into several people she knew, between 42nd Street and the Upper West Side! Crazy. But you make your way.

There’s a sort of honor in the fact that when you read at Bluestockings, five famous authors are reading at the 92nd Street Y and Woody Allen or Bill Clinton is playing saxaphone at a local pub and Jamaica Kincaid is delivering a lecture at Columbia while Kate Bornstein has a play premiering off-Broadway and fifteen amazing bands are performing here and there, and several dance and opera companies, as well as that Chekov production in the park staring Meryl Streep. Not to mention the movies, the galleries, the museums, the cafes, the restaurants, the gyms, the writing groups and cocktail parties and marches and rallies . . . And yet, a swath of folks show up for your reading. Maybe even more people than there are chairs. Because New York is a big city, man, and there are a lot of people choosing where to go based on mood and distance from apartment and who else is showing up there.

New York has cultivated loads of culture and the explosion of possibilities hasn’t short-circuited anything. Sure, if you live in a rural town in Indiana, everyone in town will show up for your book publication party. But everyone in town is about the same number of people as the 0.0000001% of New Yorkers who will show up for your book party there.

All I’m saying is that the internet might turn us, each and every one, into city slickers.

My father also said that we humans are accustomed to seeing only faces that we know, and that it confuses our brains and our biology to see so many unfamiliar faces everyday. But in New York, you learn not only to “mind your own business” but also to be willing to fall a little in love with any face you pass on the street. My father, it should be noted, was a New Yorker who fell in love with strangers on a frequent enough basis.

I confess, I prefer the bracing weather and the cramped sidewalks and the noise and smells and rats and roaches and architecture and history and parks and flesh-and-blood people of New York to the bits and bytes of the internet, but still, thinking of New York reminds me not to panic. There’s much to be gained from crowded spaces.

Last night’s Face Books Tour event at Orinda Books went off splendidly. The room was packed and many people left with raffle tickets, having purchased the wonderful books our readers wrote.

The theme of the reading was The Power of Story, addressed from many angles by the fiction and non-fiction writers who presented.

Next event is the Clayton Books Authors Festival on April 26, and then we’ll be at Bookshop West Portal on May 7 and May 14, 7 p.m., with two entirely different and wonderful line-ups. Check out my events link and the Face Books Tour link for much more information.

In other news: The wonderful Ellen Sussman is holding a special Master Class in Mystery Writing at her gorgeous home in Los Altos. Here’s the write-up from Ellen, and there is still room left. Tell her I sent you:

Master Class on Writing the Mystery Novel

Three acclaimed mystery writers, Cornelia Read, Keith Raffel and John Billheimer, will join me in a panel discussion about their craft. I’ll ask them about plotting the mystery novel, about character development, about conventions of the genre, about breaking those conventions. I’d like to find out what we non-mystery writers can learn from these masters of plot, character, voice. And for those of you who are writing mysteries, we can find out how these three have succeeded in a very competitive field.

About the guest speakers:

Cornelia Read is the acclaimed author of A Field of Darkness and The Crazy School. The Drood Review voted John Billheimer’s first book, The Contrary Blues, one of the ten best mysteries of 1998. Four subsequent novels explore various scams and scandals in the coal fields of his native state of West Virginia. Bookreporter.com called Keith Raffel’s Dot Dead: A Silicon Valley Mystery “without question the most impressive mystery debut of the year.”

Date: Wednesay, May 13, 6:30 – 9:30
Place: at my house in Los Altos Hills.
Cost: $60

Contact Ellen by email: ellen (at) ellensussman (dot) com

I (Elizabeth) just read a draft of Cornelia’s next book and I LOVED it. This is sure to

be a wonderful evening, and I’m hoping to be there myself if the babies and partner allow it .

. .