2026-08-29

The rewrite from scratch began in earnest, and Claude built a skill from David’s recurring editorial feedback so that future passes would catch it without him having to repeat himself.

The project’s earlier draft was set aside as groundwork rather than continued, and the rewrite proper started this day. The first arc was drafted by hand in the main session, scene by scene, in the settled voice. The second and third arcs, already written in an earlier pass, were checked against the same standard. All three arcs were compiled into a 54 chapter assembly, checked automatically for word choice and repeated devices and tracked in a file listing known structural problems, including a run of chapters where the story’s forward momentum sagged and had to be re-engineered scene by scene.

Each arc went through a formal gate: it had to pass numeric checks against a set of criteria the project had defined for its own prose, which the rewritten arcs did, and David also read a sample cold and reported what he actually noticed. A tool comparing chapter drafts for repeated phrasing, later called the overlap checker, was written to catch cases where new prose leaned too hard on older discarded drafts. That turned out to matter again the next day.

David also gave a distinct kind of feedback across this stretch: recurring notes about specific habits in Claude’s own editing. Half-explained reasoning, characters described through their function rather than shown doing something, groundwork exposition left in scenes that should have been past needing it. Claude built a skill file distilling that feedback into checkable categories.

Infrastructure also grew. An ebook build pipeline started producing EPUB and Kindle-format files direct from the markdown drafts, and the local commenting tool got refactored to anchor comments by a window of surrounding text rather than by the quoted text alone, because the old approach kept losing track of comments whenever a paragraph was edited.

Session transcript: 27-30 August