Anyone Got a Funny Public Defender Story?
Aug. 28th, 2025 09:37 am
Cash infusion made me merry & lazy. Though I did tromp: The weather could not be more perfect. As is my wont, I am simultaneously reading and books-on-taping. The work is Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin biography. (It's nonfiction for me until I either hammer out or give up on this first draft.)
Benjamin Franklin does remind me a bit of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; he had a surprisingly 20th-century mind for an 18th-century-er.
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Viz that first draft: The next section will be 1,000 words or so on the Memorial.
I have morphed the dead guy sufficiently from Brian so that I can't just use my own recollections of Brian's memorial.
I figured nobody wants to read about the Romantic Life of an Old Guy, so I shifted everybody's age down 30 years. All the characters are now in their early 40s, and that means they all have to have jobs—Brian-cum-Neal is a public defender! 😀—and some people from Neal's job have to turn up at the memorial.
I am thinking one of those people could provide comic relief by being one of Neal's disreputable clients that he saved from a 20-year prison sentence or something.
But, of course, I need a backstory on that one—in addition to the usual peerless prose and scintillating dialogue.
Ichabod takes client confidentiality very seriously, so I can't ask him for public defender backstories.