Dennis Latham: Life, Fiction, and the Pursuit of Madness

(Zombie Gummy Bears) 73 Killed and 175 injured from falling bullets in Libya. Rebel leaders tell troops just to say Yippee instead of firing weapons straight up. (Now you know why American troops never fire weapons in the air.) The importance of proper spelling and understanding language. (From a WCPO/Cincinnati report) "According to Police Chief James Craig, an officer approached one of the groups after noticing a man holding something near his waste. " (I guess the guy took a dump on the sidewalk.) I can actually use handwriting, which is now like a new code language. Since they don't teach it anymore, most kids can't read it. The three most thrilling things in life: sex, chocolate malts, and being shot at. If you've experienced all three, you know all there is to know about the human condition.

Taking time off from writing for Christmas (you don't see the word Christmas much anymore and it's a shame) to concentrate on singing in the studio. I go in on the 27th to record about seven Sinatra songs for a CD and a demo for possible big band work. I've had a bad head cold, and I'm working on a Z-pack to knock it out, hopefully by the 27th. The Kentucky Ghost Hunters are coming back in February to spend the night at my house. Holidays always seem to spark some activity among our live-in other dimension friends, if they can be called friends. We are supposed to have a man, woman, and child spirits, and one of them is angry all the time. Their activity doesn't seem to be on any regular schedule. It has never been aggressive, but is more to let us know they exist, with thumps, crashes, flitting images, lights on and off, and whispering. Yesterday, another one of my childhood friends, JC, reached the 65th snow mark. None of us thought we would live t...

I'm kind of at the end of a long writing journey that began when I was a Marine in Vietnam. I've never had what a person would call an amazing output in terms of volume. Some writers can write a story in two days and a novel in a week. I worked on Lord of Homicides for two years before the rewrite. Since I rewrite each day when creating the novel, my rewrites were never too difficult, but they were time consuming.  Michael In Hell and The Bad Season each took about six months. Last Chance of a Crazy Virgin , Waiting For An Open Bed , and Sudden Victims took years of collected writing. Bad Night In The Holding Cell took less than a year. My absolute favorite is Last Chance of a Crazy Virgin. I had a ball with this comedy. I wrote the first sentence in 1976 and probably finished the novel in the 80s. It made a final marketing meeting at Bantam "over the transom" and was rejected in favor of a book by a more famous writer. It was originally published as Driving...

The picture shows a killer called the "Bouncing Betty" anti-personnel mine. When tripped, the mine bounces up at least chest high before exploding. The one who trips it will probably die or be maimed, but often in the great mystery of war, the one who trips it may survive while others die. This was the case around November of 1967 in the Street Without Joy in the I Corps of South Vietnam. My Marine battalion 1/3 was nearing the end of an operation. I was with H&S Company as part of an S-2 field interrogation unit. I usually had a tethered prisoner to push along in front of me while I followed in his footsteps. At times, we had tracked vehicles with us on flat ground. This was a bonus because I could walk in the trail left by the treads and not worry about tripping a mine. I didn't have either one on this day on the right flank, moving over hard bare ground. Real war isn't like the movies where troops bunch up and tell jokes or walk in a big cluster giving their o...