A new Ray Cruz story

Ray Cruz is a piece of fictional meanness I conjured up a while back. One story about him ran in the last Crimespree and now there is a story at Plots with Guns. It is called "Padrino," and I've just re-read it, and I still like it. Sometimes I re-read a story and dislike it. If I'm lucky, I do that before I send it out to a magazine editor. There's a tip for beginning writers - set aside at least as much as you send out. Be your own worst critic - trust me, if you don't do it, there'll be a line out the door of people waiting to do it for you.

In any event, I'm not as happy with the pictures of myself in PWG. In case you're interested though the pictures have a glue gun being pressed to my head, there are no glue guns in the story. Ray doesn't work that way.

In any event, I'm thinking another Ray Cruz story might come out on Kindle along with a bunch of others one of these days. We'll see.

Tell me what you think of the story.

John Mayer and Me

Mayer has left Twitter leaving millions of fans with nothing to read or respond to, and I'm thinking that if I were to join Twitter now, I mean, right now, this very day, perhaps a large portion of these otherwise aimless people would become my followers (or friends or whatever the term is) and they would love everything I write and be willing to buy my books and track down my stories online and make me a millionaire like Mayer is.

When I heard he had quit Twitter, my initial reaction was to ask "Why is this news?" But that is the cranky old man in me. My second reaction was to try to think of a song by John Mayer. Couldn't do it. I'm sure I've heard his songs and if I googled them and saw the titles, I'd probably know the melody. I haven't googled it; it's been a full day since hearing the "news," but I still can't come up with a title. Ah well. My loss.

Didn't Mayer dump Jennifer Aniston? That's a move I can't understand from the looks side of things. Of course, Aniston may be a shrew in real life or perhaps smell funny. Still, Brad Pitt dumped her for Angelina Jolie who, frankly, I think looks more manly than Pitt does though I'm not sure that's saying much. Aniston does seem to whine a bit much since she's always on the cover of magazines at my supermarket checkout, and she's always complaining that Brad Pitt left her childless while impregnating Angelina Jolie countless times (Pitt that is, not Aniston).

Back to Mayer. Apparently, 3.7 million people were left in the lurch when he quit Twitter, and, if I understand correctly, these people had to be invited to join his account at Twitter so imagine all the millions of personalized notes he sent out to gather this collection of Twitter-buddies and all the little cards he'll have to prepare to let people know that he'll no longer be able to twit with them. This seems to be an enormous amount of work and may well be the reason why I haven't heard any of his songs - he simply hasn't had the time to do any singing.