Writing

... but it did put food on our table.

She could take a rat's nest of notes written on random scraps of paper and recorded on cassette tapes, all stuffed in a banker's box, and turn it into a coherent book.

And she was damned discrete about it too.

Usually it wasn't the authors themselves who paid her.

I'll confess she did the same with a few of my high school term papers, but those were all my own research, nothing more, nothing less. She used to hear me typing late into the night, tap...tap tap...tappitytappity, tap, tap, tap... and I think it would keep her awake making her more and more agitated until she couldn't stand it any more. Then she'd storm in, push me aside, read through my semi-final draft of chicken scratches, hammer out the paper in a couple of minutes, and go back to bed, all without a word.

In college my poor teachers had to suffer the chicken scratches. On exams I'd fill three blue books for every blue book my classmates required. Word processing on the university computers, namely vi, saved my ass.

My paternal grandfather wrote a novel and I have a section of it my mom edited, including all the edits my grandfather crossed out in anger. He never let my mom see any part of it again. The novel was never published. My mom's edit is good. If he'd been able to work with her something might have come of it.