Episode Details

CRAIG JOHNSON

Wendy Corr:

Well, hey there folks, welcome to the Roundup. We are a Cowboy State Daily podcast, and we focus on interesting people in the Cowboy State.

Now, I don't do repeat guests. It's just, I try to get somebody new every week. And we've been doing this for, oh my gosh, almost two years now. But if you're going to do a repeat guest, this gentleman is who I have to do a repeat with, because Craig Johnson has so much going on.

He is, bar none, Wyoming loves Craig Johnson - and Longmire fans around the world love Craig Johnson, and are grateful for Craig Johnson. I am so tickled to be able to catch up with Craig today.

He's actually not even in Wyoming today, he's in New Orleans picking up a really wonderful honor. But first, before we go to Craig, I want to make sure you all know about the Wyoming Business Alliance "Business From the Basement" podcast. If you're a Wyoming business person, this is a podcast you need to tune into.

It has great information. It introduces you to wonderful people in the business world in Wyoming. You definitely want to check out the Wyoming "Business From the Basement" podcast from the Wyoming Business Alliance. But don't go there yet, because first we have to have this really fun conversation with Craig Johnson.

Because every conversation with Craig Johnson is fun. That is just, I think that's a rule - Craig, did you make that rule, that every conversation you have has to be fun?

Craig Johnson:

You'll have get my wife on here again, she would probably have some different idea.

Wendy Corr:

Okay, well, that's a whole different level there. But , when we're talking about your books, when we're talking about your adventures - because you have your own adventures, you don't just create them for your characters.

You have just brought to life and brought to the world the quintessential Sheriff that everybody wants in their town. Everybody wishes that Walt Longmire was the Sheriff of their town. I'm not so sure that everybody wants Vic as the UnderSheriff, because she's a little much but, but Walt loves her, and so to the rest of us.

Craig Johnson:

Yeah, it's, one of the joys of writing a series is, is that you get the opportunity to, , have an ensemble of characters like that. And so that's kind of one of the fun things like that.

And, , there are two types of emails that I get after every book. One is, 'You beat up on Walt too much in the last book, you need to take it easy on him.' Which is very flattering, because evidently they think, well, it's real.

And then the other one was, is always, 'There was not enough of my favorite character, Insert name here.' And basically, , I always try and organize the book so that there's a different amount of the different characters.

was, if you had the same amount of the same characters every time, the books are going to become somewhat formulaic like that. But there's always people that complain and say, ' what, there wasn't enough Henry in the last book.' 'There wasn't enough Vic in the last book.' 'There wasn't enough Lucian in the last book.'

And I knew I'd gotten to a certain point in time whenever people started writing me and saying, , 'There really wasn't enough Dog in the last book.' And I was like, okay, all right, okay, so , I'll take that under consideration.

Wendy Corr:

So you've created this really close knit following of people who just feel like your characters are part of their family. And that's one of the things that's so magical about your books.

You care about Saizarbitoria and what his family is doing. You care abo