A significant turning point in my writing occurred when a fiction mentor reminded me that the simple concept of originality is a critical but often overlooked key to great writing. He said, of a story I’d just finished, “Yes, it’s good, very good. Well-written. But it sounds like Proust. Problem is, thousands of competent, contemporary writers sound like Proust.” (Continue Reading)
4/29/15 INTRODUCING JOSEPH D HASKE, OUR GUEST BLOGGER FOR 5/1/15
Must Writers be Musicians?
Everyone loves music, don’t they? Most people claim they do. But ask any musician what proportion of people in an audience are actually listening and appreciating the music, and you get a different answer. A couple of weeks ago, while I was in Minneapolis attending the Associated Writers Conference, I found myself in a jazz bar downtown, completely surrounded by writers (most of them still had their conference nametags on), and guess how many were applauding the musicians’ solos? One. Me. And this wasn’t a third-rate provincial band, but an excellent one, (Continue Reading)
4/23/15 DAN ELDON’S DEZIREE SAFARIS
The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon. Death by the will of the people. I didn’t want to write about this death, but can’t seem to put it aside. It’s been almost twelve years since Dan Eldon’s death on July 12, 1993. I first learned about it from the book of his journals which I picked up on the sale table at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Dan didn’t die in DC. He was stoned to death in Somalia, a young white man in the wrong place at a most difficult moment. (Continue Reading)
4/20/15 REVIEW OF JENNIFER YACOVISSI’S UP THE HILL TO HOME
I have eclectic reading tastes. Up the Hill to Home differs from North Dixie Highway, which I reviewed here in February, as much as baking bread in your middle-class home with the help of all your young children differs from finishing a fifth of cheap whiskey alone in the backseat of the car you’re currently living in. No book is for everyone. Up the Hill to Home is for unhurried readers, ones who savor gentler, kinder domesticity and who don’t need a fast plot but can settle in for a long, relaxing saga with gems sprinkled here and there and with a conclusion that leaves you sad and happy at once. (Continue Reading)
4/17/2015 – What Makes a Liar?
I attend monthly meetings of the local chapter, Mystery Writers of America. The conversation is stimulating and the speaker usually offers technical expertise I can use in my mystery novels. This month’s meeting was no exception. Guest speaker was Stan Burke, a retired FBI special agent and an expert in statement analysis. He is now president of Precision Intelligence Consulting, which specializes in training its clients in innovative investigative techniques.
Is the supposed victim lying? Did he really see a gun or is he making that up? Was he really kidnapped on Friday afternoon (Continue Reading)
4/7/2015 GETTING A GOOD START: WHY A NOVEL’S FIRST CHAPTER IS CRUCIAL
So you’re browsing the bargain table at your favorite bookstore, the latest recommendations from Amazon, or maybe perusing your local library’s “new fiction” shelf. A cover appeals to you, you read the blurb on the back, and you open it to taste the first sentences. Within seconds, you make a decision: To read or not to read. The book goes back on the shelf or you decide to take it home with you. It’s a kind of one-way speed dating where first impressions mean everything. (Continue Reading)
4/04/2015 – ENDINGS: MUSINGS ON STATION ELEVEN
As I pulled into the last paragraph of Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, I flipped to the last page to confirm I was nearing the end, trying to concentrate on every word and how it felt to read it because everything was about to change. I often play this game when nearing the end of an engrossing novel, superimposing my awareness of the impending close over the experience of still being in the story, doing whatever I can to prolong the moment and appreciate the incompletion. I know that yet another world is about to end for me, and I want to savor every remaining moment before I am shut out forever. (Continue Reading)
PREVIEW OF OUR APRIL 1 GUEST BLOGGER NANCY LYNN JARVIS – Mystery author Nancy Lynn Jarvis finally acknowledged she’s having too much fun writing to ever sell another house and let her license lapse in May, 2013, after her twenty-fifth anniversary in real estate. After earning a BA in behavioral science from San Jose State University, she worked in the advertising department of the San Jose Mercury News. A move to Santa Cruz meant a new job as a librarian and later a stint as the business manager for Shakespeare Santa Cruz at UCSC. She invites you to take a peek into the real esta
te world through the stories that form the backdrop of her Regan McHenry Real Estate mysteries. (Continue Reading)
3/26/15 IN PRAISE OF WOMEN OF GENIUS After my last essay, “On Talent and Genius”, whose examples of genius were mostly or—ahem—entirely male, one of my readers archly asked if I might be biased, even subconsciously. Of course one can affirm confidently that one is not biased consciously, but the charge of subconscious bias is unanswerable. The only way I could disprove it is by taking a psychological test. (And even then…) However, I do have a couple of responses to the accusation: first, my examples were male not because I believe that no women of genius could have been exercising those arts, but that in fact few did, until quite recently, because of societal pressures. (Continue Reading)
3/23/15 LEE SUMMERALL’S SAFARI ENCOUNTER BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
Lee Summerall’s writing is casual, irreverent, personal, rambling, and chock-a-block with imagery that tastes of lemon and red
wine. Lee’s travel dispatches arrive erratically from exotic worlds—China, Tunisia, Rome, Namibia, Morocco. Most recently she reported on a close encounter with an elephant much too interested in her three-ton safari vehicle. It brought to life my own adventures in Krueger in 2013, but I don’t think you had to be there to enjoy the writing, so I convinced Lee to let me share her dispatch with Late Last Night Books followers.
She writes: South Africa’s Kruger National Park is about the same size as Pinellas County, Florida. While Pinellas County has about a million residents, Kruger has about a million animals: all the usual suspects including the Big Five, every kind of antelope, all the cats (or so they say), and over two hundred varieties of bird. (Continue Reading)
3/17/2015 – Crime and Punishment
I learn so much from attending meetings of the local chapter of Sisters in Crime, an association of writers and fans of mystery fiction. This month’s meeting was no exception. Guest speaker was playwright Betty May. As a volunteer with I-WISH, a group of women prisoners at the Maryland Correctional Institution for women, she encouraged them to write about their lives, and then compiled their essays, poems, memoirs, and prayers into a chronological format which became a play called Faces.
Too young, too stupid, too ignorant, these women say and so they made bad choices and bad friends. Now they’re serving life sentences in a maximum security prison. They describe unspeakable things that (Continue Reading)
3/10/2015—THE POWER OF THE CHARACTERS WE HATE
Amy Dunne is one of the most despicable and yet well-known fictional
characters today. Gone Girl, the novel that introduced Amy to the world, sold more than 2,000,000 print and digital copies in its first year of publication. Since its release in October 2014, the film version of the novel has grossed around $370,000,000 worldwide. People want to know about Amy—not because they like her but because they can’t stop watching her.
Like most unlikeable characters, Amy can’t help creating conflict, which is the heart of any good story. Unlikeable characters hook their readers because they cause their own consequences. Circumstances aren’t thrust on them. Whether their actions are immoral, illegal, insensitive, or just cruel, they are responsible for the problems they generate, and an active character is always more compelling than an inactive one. (Continue Reading)
3/04/2015 – REIMAGINING THE MOMENT
I’ve just finished reading two novels that re-envision a few days out of history, one about a famous battle, the other an obscure murder. Both novels include meticulously researched historical details, stretched here and there to fit the arc of a story and perhaps highlight a deeper truth, but still leaving readers with a fresh sense of worlds long vanished. More than that, though, both 
novels reminded me of the infinite richness in the smallness, shortest of moments, something all writers should remember.
(Continue Reading)
TIME ON A TIGHTROPE
Imagine you are high above the crowd, walking a tightrope.
Fans are on the edges of their seats as you put one foot before the other, holding their collective breaths and waiting to see what happens next as you slowly cross the span without a net. You know what you have to do to keep them entranced is a breathtaking combination of focus and balance. One misstep, lean a little too far one way or the other—and SPLAAAT. And the big finish has to be more thrilling than the last; you want them to leave the big top panting and coming back for more. (Continue Reading)
TALENT or GENIUS?
What is genius? How is it different from talent? Is it a matter of degree, or is it something altogether distinct?
In the past week on Facebook—admittedly not the most elevated forum, though I like to think that most of my friends are fairly bright—I have read that the following people are geniuses: JK Rowling, Prince and Stevie Wonder. I also read that Taylor Swift is extremely talented: she must be, said my friend, an intelligent person, because she is so widely popular. (I had perhaps foolishly, and certainly thoughtlessly, given the opinion that she was ‘completely talentless.’)
For a number of reasons, these comments disturbed me, and forced me to consider—yet again—whether it is possible to make any objective evaluation of the talent of an artist—Aesthetics 101—and also, if it’s possible to discuss the subject without simply getting into a curmudgeonly rant about declining standards, whether there is such a thing as genius, and if so, whether we might be able to define it (Continue Reading)
2/23/15 DANGEROUS CHARACTERS BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
In 1927 Elmer Gantry was banned in Boston and denounced from pulpits across the USA.
Gantry was a hard-drinking, womanizing, college football player, who grew into a sometimes sober, womanizing, evangelist minister. The denunciations weren’t because ministers were suddenly being held to a higher standard—it was because the fictional Elmer Gantry was a character in a novel by American author Sinclair Lewis.
In 2008, the Swedish novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, knocked American readers out of 
their collective comfort zone. The story seemed to be about a journalist named Mikael, publisher of a Swedish political magazine, but several chapters in, readers’ imaginations got hijacked by “pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander.” (Continue Reading)
2/17/2015 – Truth in her Dress
“Truth in her dress finds facts too tight; in fiction she moves with ease.” This quote has stayed with me since college freshman days. I’ve pondered it over the years, both as a reader and a writer.
I think of the quote when I read savage satire where the facts are too tight. And I think of the quote when I read historical fiction that helps me with dates, incidents, and characters difficult to remember. In fiction, they move with ease. The quote works on many levels.
But who said it? A quick google search turned up the author: Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali polymath poet and the first non-European to win the Nobel prize. (Continue Reading)
2/04/2014 – ON ADDING TO THE WORLD’S BABBLE
It is easy to throw words down on the page. But how much more difficult it is to choose which of these words are worth keeping, worth sculpting, worth sharing. (Continue Reading)
Agnar Mykle’s Lasso Round the Moon—& a Rant about American Literary Parochialism
“So much of American fiction has become playful, cynical and evasive,” says novelist Joy Williams, and she goes on to deplore its “inconsequentialities”. I agree. And because I am ever more bored by the contemporary American novel, which strikes me, to add some adjectives to hers, as increasingly myopic, solipsistic and parochial, not to mention uninspired—especially the hip sacred cows like Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, and Miranda July—I find myself ‘playing truant’ whenever I can, running for refuge to Latin America or Europe, where writers have not yet learned to turn out the MFA novel, which generally comes in one of two flavours: either flawless technically but deadly dull, dealing with domestic melodramas (Richard Russo, Jane Smiley) or else ‘quirky’, linguistically imaginative (July, Saunders, Shteyngart, Safran-Foer) and yet shallow and pretentious. (Continue Reading)