The Trials and Tribulations of the Velvet Hammer - a trial lawyer's memoir begins its life on Substack

Between 2016 and 2017 wrote a memoir while on planes. Flying around to speak at trial lawyer associations around the country. Was never quite sure what to do with it. But felt it could have several purposes. First, if one of the plane crashed (god forbid), my kids would be left with their mother’s version of her life story. Second , it might be interesting to others. Particularly those looking for insight for whatever reasons.

At one point installed an app to help keep track of the chapters. But alas. The app didn’t survive. And so the remnants lay within the bowels of my computer history. Fortunately saved at one point to an external hard drive. Since my laptop had fried itself not once but twice in the interim.

It is now the end of Memorial Day Weekend. A rainy blustery day in Seattle. Finish the last of 12 employee reviews. Get thru email. And decide to do a deep dive into Claude ai. Which we are not allowed to sync with our systems for confidentiality and safety reasons. Instead, decide to create projects to try to get arms around my extracurricular writings. Trial diaries. Speeches. Can’t figure out how to import the blog from squarepage. And as am hunting thru that old drive, happen upon The Trials and Tribulations of the Velvet Hammer. In three different places.

Pull everything into Claude and give it these instructions: I want you to put this in order - to remove all duplicates and to create a table of contents. Please do not rewrite or change a single word or photo as they are currently. This is phase one of the project.

Claude does as asked. Probably grimacing at the typos and grammatical oddities which is the way that I think and write.

Last month Alysha wrote a scientific self study piece on Substack. It explored her own journey with Long Covid including an wealth of studies and data sources. https://open.substack.com/pub/afungko/p/writing-into-my-long-covid-anniversary?r=8wdj1&utm_medium=ios

I had no idea what Substack was. She sent me some articles and mentioned, this is where I should consider posting longer pieces than my velvethammer blog. I parked that advice.

But am mentally getting ready to start tomorrow off by waiting for a jury verdict in a 50 year old foster child sex abuse case. And decide to dust off the memoir. Pepper it with trial diary excerpts. And launch it onto Substack.

This grand idea is all good and well. But it also means need to figure out how to do this. Upload. Figure it out. Insert the beginning of the story. Add in some pictures for historical interest. And try to post it.

This is not as easy as it seems. Because there is a newsletter element. Subscribers to your channel are the ones who get notified. And the buttons are pollywampus compared to the other buttons am used to. Ultimately publish it. Accidentally will be paused for 24 hours. Not sure that happened. But there it is.

So if you would like to join this journey. Or just read other neat things published by thousands of writers. Please add the Substack app. And find me as Karen Koehler

Photo: taken by dad layout courtesy of Substack