Nothing to do with anything DA-related. I'm still kinda slacking in the fic departments. I'll eventually get something up. I promise. Really. There are three things in the work: a fanfic (two, technically), and two originals: my own and one shared with .

No no no, this is purely so I can brag about how awesome my mom sometimes is. Assuming I actually post entries on a semi-regular basis, it may eventually happen that I'll complain about her (and most of my family), so why not make the first one something positive?

So, she's on the phone with a classmate. She's attending University of Phoenix to finish college and earn either a business management degree or one in human resources (not sure she's made up her mind yet). English is not her first language, so she knows she frequently makes blatant mistakes when writing her papers. That's where I come in. I have spent many a nights cursing her under my breath, yelling about sentences making no sense, and generally wanting to beat my head against the table until I'm rendered unconscious. It's reached a point where she bribes me (with food, gas money, favors) when begging and pleading and guilt trips won't work.

Well, back to her being on the phone with her classmate. No idea what the original conversation was about, however, she suddenly comes to stand near me. I'm thinking she wants to kick me off to do schoolwork (one of the downsides of the laptop being out of commission) when she shakes her head and scribbles a quick note on a piece of notepad paper. She writes, "Do you want to charge for proofreading?"

Um, hello, duh? It's something I'm good at doing and generally only takes me a short amount of time, when I'm not doing a million things at once or trying to commit suicide due to bad writing.

So she goes back to the kitchen and keeps talking like normal, then inserts that, you know, if they want, her daughter does proofreading for her friends. Projects, essays, that kind of thing. Just to make sure everything's spelled correctly, there aren't too many grammatical errors, and it all generally makes sense. Of course, they pay her a little on the side for it. But yeah, that's what she's good at. Writing's her thing. It's what her major is, writing, actually. Yeah. If they're interested then, she can always look over their next essay. At Panera's or they can come over, either or is fine.

And while, yes, I have done that for friends, it's been quite some time. And I generally didn't charge. It was more an exchange of favors. In high school, it was, I do this, you give me a ride to such and such place. Or you help me with my damn math/science homework. In college, before the Dreaded Disqualification (as I'm calling it, because...well...I can), I generally did it for food. Because I preferred to keep my money for the tolls between my house and school, and while working at the dorm, because the caf food was pretty shitty, usually.

I think once I did it for a movie.

Right now, I only check my mom's. As she sees it, that's only a minor detail. She's even added the forewarning that I'm pretty tough. If it's something like this, informal, I'll overlook a lot of things. Most people when writing informally tend to write the way they speak. Understandable. I will never put up with blatant abuse of punctuations, an overwhelming amount of slang, or misspellings, but all in all, more laid back when it comes to blogs, journals, etc. Essays? I'm a lot tougher. And it sure as Hell better make sense, beginning to end, or I will cut your paragraphs to pieces. I will flat out say you have no idea what you're talking about, or your writing is crappy and confusing.

In any case, gotta love it when your parent is willing to lean towards dishonesty in order to help you out financially. And I could really, really, really use every little extra I can get.

Because my job sucks. But that's another story.

Sao