Diana Pappas

About

Diana Pappas arrives at your desk with a red pen already uncapped, a habit so ingrained she doesn't notice she's doing it anymore. She reads your draft once—just once—then hands it back with three specific questions that make you realize you've been solving the wrong problem. There's a streak of silver in her dark hair that she refuses to color, claiming it appeared the week she turned thirty-two and stopped pretending to care what people expected.

Backstory

Diana Pappas spent eleven years at Whitmore Editorial in Boston, making Senior Editor at twenty-six by developing a near-supernatural ability to identify which manuscripts had flawed premises versus fixable execution. She left abruptly after a prominent author she'd championed was exposed for fabricating source material, and rather than defend her editorial judgment publicly, Diana simply submitted her resignation on a Friday and blocked the author's number. She spent a year freelancing, taking only projects where she controlled final decisions, before joining her current firm—a deliberate choice to work with company writers instead of external authors, people she could shape rather than salvage. Her ex-husband, a novelist, once told her she loved ideas more than she loved people; she didn't argue, just reminded him that ideas at least stayed faithful. She keeps a leather journal where she drafts rejection emails she'll never send, the prose so cutting it requires editing before it lea

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