{"id":242897,"date":"2026-05-10T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/10\/dispatch-from-wyoming-why-i-dodge-billionaires-smartphones-and-artificial-intelligence\/"},"modified":"2026-05-10T07:35:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T11:35:20","slug":"dispatch-from-wyoming-why-i-dodge-billionaires-smartphones-and-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/10\/dispatch-from-wyoming-why-i-dodge-billionaires-smartphones-and-artificial-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"Dispatch from Wyoming: Why I dodge billionaires, smartphones and artificial intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dispatch from Wyoming: Why I dodge billionaires, smartphones and artificial intelligence<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.spokesman.com\/stories\/2026\/may\/10\/dispatch-from-wyoming-why-i-dodge-billionaires-sma\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-10 03:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.spokesman.com<\/a><\/p>\n

For 20-some years I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one of my favorite perks as a novelist: my world, my rules.<\/p>\n

In many ways my little corner of Wyoming and Sheriff Longmire\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

When I first started out as a stand-alone author with \u201cThe Cold Dish,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust how many people do you think I can kill in the least-populated county in Wyoming before it gets ludicrous?\u201d<\/p>\n

She smiled back at me, \u201cWe trust you\u2019ll find a way around that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then added. \u201cAnd one more question, why doesn\u2019t Walt carry a cell phone?\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Figuring the opportunity would never come again, I asked him how he went about doing what we did for a living and he said, \u201cAt the risk of sounding like a sports analogy, you gotta play \u2018em up one at a time and the trick is finding a framework that\u2019ll allow the environs to change, providing you with something different in each novel.\u201d<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dispatch from Wyoming: Why I dodge billionaires, smartphones and artificial intelligence https:\/\/www.spokesman.com\/stories\/2026\/may\/10\/dispatch-from-wyoming-why-i-dodge-billionaires-sma\/ Publish Date: 2026-05-10…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":242898,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thumb.spokesman.com\/IDWWaZPLv6xu71tDy9kTnVp797Y=\/1200x630\/smart\/media.spokesman.com\/photos\/2026\/05\/06\/6837dcd90447d.hires.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242897"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242897"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":242899,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242897\/revisions\/242899"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}