: About Me

Persia Walker, a former news writer for The Associated Press, is the award-winning author of HARLEM REDUX and DARKNESS AND THE DEVIL BEHIND ME. Visit her online at www.persiawalker.com. She is also senior editor at Gentle Pen Editorial Services (www.gentlepen.com), a boutique agency offering highly individualized support to agents and their writers.

She has worked for The Associated Press in Arkansas; Washington, DC; and New York. She has also written for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Inc., (RFE) in Munich, worked as a freelance book editor, done cultural reporting and voice work for European publication.

She's happily single, fluent in German, breathtakingly disorganized, and sporadically inspired to cook. She enjoys Indian and Thai food for dining, romantic thrillers and detective stories for reading, movies about superheroes, and television programs about desperate housewives and true crime. Her perfect Sunday morning includes a lengthy and lazy browse through the most frivolous parts of The New York Times Online.

She loves afternoons at the Met and dreams of weekends in the Hamptons, but is in fact is a real homebody. There's almost always some suitcase standing around half-packed in her home, but it's from her last trip and not in anticipation of any new one. As a writer, she's a monumentally undisciplined procrastinator who growls at her friends when they distract her, but then busily distracts herself. For more damaging information, you'll have to read her blog, Criminal Musings, at www.persiawalker.blogspot.com.

My passion is ...

Writing and helping others develop their potential

I know too much about ...

failure to ever take success for granted

My childhood ambition ...

was to travel, live overseas and write - and I did.

My favorite memory ...

holding my infants in my arms for the first time.

Why I write ...

because I have to.

Arts & Humanities > Thoughts on Writing Editing: Knowing when to stop critiquing and move on

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When I'm wearing my editing hat over at Gentle Pen, I often see manuscripts that are in dire need of a rewrite. Of course, the authors are upset when I impart this news. Some say they'll buckle down and get to it; others refuse. Why? Quite bluntly, some are just lazy. But others are so exhausted after having done at least one major rewrite that they freak at the thought of having to do another one. So I suggest ways to handle the edits, ways to break them down into manageable stages. (After all, sometimes just a few changes in choices can having resounding effects.) But even with the task ...

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