Having trouble mating... Help! P-p-p-pleease

Hey, all! So I've noticed that I have trouble mating the King in a crowd. I am a beginner and have just recently began to study chess seriously. I obviously have leaks in my game and this is one of them.

It is quite common at my level for my opponents to leave their king in the center of the board and to delay castling in favor of random knight moves all over the board etc... So putting their King on the run has proved to be fairly simple with solid development and center control. However, once they are on the run I have trouble coming up with short mating patterns that I really feel are there and that I'm simply too inexperienced to see them. Typically taking me, what I feel , has to be way too many moves to checkmate.

Does anybody have any reading, video, or book training they can recommend? Thank you kindly in advance for any suggestions. God Bless and Take Care! :)

The easiest thing is to analyze each game afterwards with the computer. Do this with every game.

This gets into a topic that I call "early termination," which is a middlegame mate, meaning it's a different scenario than an endgame mate since, as you said, the board is a lot more crowded in the middlegame. The two most common mates, in my experience, that happen in the middlegame are the Swallow's Tail Mate and the Opera Mate. Also learn the Arabian Mate. The first two are very common in chess puzzles, especially the daily puzzles on this site and in games posted for analysis on this site where the poster overlooked a mate-in-one.

For example, the following page shows variations on the Swallow's Tail Mate pattern, although it's calling that a "Blocked Hind Legs", and also the Opera Mate, although it's calling that a "B-N Rake":

http://agiquest.blog.com/2014/11/19/useful-chess-patterns-and-concepts-that-lack-formal-names/

A decent (but not great) book that discusses such patterns is the following:

(p. 14)
 The above thinking was a lucky happenstance for me. I was right. The
memorization alone would be too much. The effort too great, I would in-
evitably fail. I needed help. I had to make a short cut, and many as well. I
would have to try to classify the most common combinations as best I
could. Then I would not have to memorize all the possible combinations;
rather I would just have to master the basic patterns and look for the tell-
tale signposts. Breaking down combinations into groups and learning their
basic patterns meant that suddenly the workload didn't seem overwhelm-
ing after all. In fact, it seemed straightforward and fun as well. I would
just learn a slew of patterns, mix them up to suit the needs of a given posi-
tion an make the combination work for the specifics of each position!
Presto. Instant chess mastery. In the meantime, I continued to lose most of
my games.

Seirawan, Yasser. 2006. Winning Chess Combinations. London: Gloucester Publishers plc.

Vucovic's book _The Art of Attack in Chess_ goes into great detail on common middlegame attacks--not just the actual mate but the lead-up to it.  His discussion of focal points helped me a lot in being able to see mating attacks and not letting the king skitter off.  The chapter on the classical bishop sacrifice (AKA Greek Gift) is worth the price of the book by itself, in my opinion.  He does a very thorough job working out groundrules for when this sacrifice will work and when it won't.  I use his approach every time I sack that bishop, and I have sacked a lot of them!

If you can't afford/don't like books, another approach is to find a study buddy and work on those games where you got an attack but couldn't mate.  If the mate *was* there, finding it will improve your eye for next time.  I think this is more likely to work than looking at master games, because it's more helpful to know where the mates are in positions you can actually get....

A lot of us play endless games, often blitz, making the same mistakes over and over; the idea behind studying your losses is at least to start trying some different mistakes!

Thanks all!