Dispatch from Wyoming: Why I dodge billionaires, smartphones and artificial intelligence

Source Domain: www.spokesman.com

For 20-some years I’ve been writing about the sheriff of the least-populated county in the scarcely populated state of Wyoming, but only five years have passed for Walt Longmire.

That’s one of my favorite perks as a novelist: my world, my rules.

In many ways my little corner of Wyoming and Sheriff Longmire’s Absaroka County stand apart from the antics ripped from the current headlines. The billionaire influx over in Jackson Hole is a pretty isolated occurrence and really doesn’t have much of an effect on those of us in the rest of the state. I like to keep it that way for Walt and his environs.

When I first started out as a stand-alone author with “The Cold Dish,” Kathryn Court, the president of Viking/Penguin Publishing, took me aside. She told me she really loved the characters and the setting of the book and wondered if I would be interested in pursuing a series of Longmire novels.

“Just how many people do you think I can kill in the least-populated county in Wyoming before it gets ludicrous?”

She smiled back at me, “We trust you’ll find a way around that.”

Then added. “And one more question, why doesn’t Walt carry a cell phone?”

About that time, I was fortunate enough to win a short story contest and one of the benefits was having dinner with the great Tony Hillerman. He was on his 18th novel, and I was laboring over my second, which is generally ceded by most writers as the most difficult to compose in a writing life.

Figuring the opportunity would never come again, I asked him how he went about doing what we did for a living and he said, “At the risk of sounding like a sports analogy, you gotta play ‘em up one at a time and the trick is finding a framework that’ll allow the environs to change, providing you with something different in each novel.”

I thought about that for a long time, finally coming to the conclusion that the most impacting and unpredictable thing that had the largest scale effect on us…

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