I remove the Feedback links.

I just deleted the Feedback links from this blog. Why? Because someone used it to try to sell me something.

Sheesh.

Get this. This guy writes me an e-mail message commenting on my articles about Wickenburg. Some of them are pretty good, he says. (Gee, thanks.) Then he comments about the only piece of fiction I wrote that appears on my Web site, telling me that it “needs work” and suggests adding a serial killer. (I can’t make this shit up.) Finally, he gets around to his real purpose for clicking that Feedback link: to suggest that I read a book that I suspect he wrote and self-published. Except he doesn’t call it a book. He calls it a “story.” And he provides a link to a Web page about the book.

I read the message four times, trying to figure out if I knew this guy. After all, he wrote to me as if we’d already met. And insulting a stranger’s writing isn’t a good way to score points with them, so he must have already known me. Right? So I wrote back, telling him I was trying to figure out why he was trying to sell me a book. I also asked if I knew him, apologizing, in advance, if we’d met and I’d forgotten him. (I forget people all the time.) That’s when he got kind of huffy and apologized for taking up my time.

End of story.

I deleted the message. And I deleted the Feedback links. I’ll also be deleting my e-mail address from my Web site when I get back to my office on Monday morning.

But I can’t help wondering how many other people he contacted, out of the blue, to try to sell his book to.

Some people really do need to get a life.