She told BuzzFeed News that the book is made up from extracts of a journal she wrote during her struggle with breast cancer. She’s been writing it for over 10 years.

A former Zimbabwean diplomat who came to the UK as a refugee herself in 2002, Mpofu-Coles was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007.

She had lost her brothers, parents and first husband in a short space of time, and her daughters – Michelle, 26, and Tadiwa, 21 – were still young.

“I started writing into a journal daily about how I feel. I didn’t have many people to talk to so I just used to write talking to God,” she told BuzzFeed News.

“It is a mini bio about the struggle with breast cancer: the resilience, the support, the doctors, the lows and ups, the reflection [on] my childhood,” she said, adding that it also looks at how she coped with the deaths of her husband and family.

The book, called ‘Dear God From Your Poached Egg Breast’, also covers her time as a female civil servant and diplomat for Zimbabwe’s government, working and studying through cancer treatment and chronic pain, and contains “an infusion of African innuendos to ‘Dear God…’” she said.

go bump in the night

scratches at your door

alarming noises

“where are you, kitty?” looks under bed to see a pair of luminous eyes staring out of the gloom, unblinking. “oh there you are!”

you spot movement out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look you see nothing 

They’re not even “new”. Like, really. People don’t seem to understand what it actually means to be “in beta”, let alone closed beta. They’re pre-new.

I get that there are a lot of services that call themselves beta and are more stable/established/better funded, but it still means you’re going to be in for a bumpy ride and that the service is being made available “as-is” because it’s still in active development.

To clarify, Pillowfort intends to make registration free when they go into open beta, and to fund the site via 1) optional paid memberships for additional, non-essential features, and 2) an opt-in ad program. Personally, I’m wary of the latter, but I understand the desire of having that additional source of revenue when they’re just starting out, and it’s my hope that with enough support via paid members, they won’t need to resort to it after all.

People on this site seem to understand the value of supporting artists, crafters, writers, etc for the time and effort they put into their work, yet have come to expect online services to be free.

As far as I know, the Pillowfort “team” only has two full-time developers working on the site. Never minding the sky-high server/bandwidth expenses of running a website with thousands of users– these are people who are working on this project in place of a more reliable job at an established agency or company. Does their time and effort have no value?

Programmers are in demand. They’re well-paid positions. If they wanted to make easy money, building their own social media platform from scratch and politely asking users to maybe pay five freaking dollars is about as far from “easy money” as they could get.

The notion that it’s “shady” and “capitalistic” of them to want their project to be able to break even is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

As far as their for-profit status goes, I can hardly blame them. The amount of accountability required to run a non-profit involves a lot of work and comes with a lot of legal red tape. I wouldn’t expect a project this early in its infancy to have the resources to handle that.

And let’s be real: AO3 is a non-profit that runs on a shoestring budget and has all their expense/revenue info publicly available– and yet there are still people who “”“don’t trust why they need that much money”“”

My brain: