2026-08-30
User:
You are running the pre-David pass on the last five scenes of act two of the third draft of Book 1 of Autoroad. redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished
,87-nothing-to-write.md unpublished,88-ask-me-in-a-month.md unpublished,89-the-road-south-east.md unpublished. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Consult notes/canon/characters/redacted.md(Voice — binding),notes/canon/characters/mattie-ordish.md,notes/canon/characters/minor.md (Sennet, Ferrin, redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Do not read or cite anything undernotes/sealed/.Report every finding as: file, the exact sentence quoted, the problem in one line, and a concrete replacement wording where one is needed. Apply the "does this sentence make sense" lens (shape filled but fact unchecked) as a separate sweep after the voice sweep — count every count (chain readings, links, yards, days, the knot's day count, levels, the whip numbers), check every date and every back-reference against the earlier third-draft scenes. Scene 89 unpublished is the act's last scene: check its ending against the endings-are-cuts rule and say whether it is a cut or a cadence. Scene 86 unpublished is long (1,850 words): say where a chapter could break inside it. Number the findings. No preamble, no praise.
I'll start by reading the skill and the voice documents.
🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md
✅ 395 lines, 25262 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md
✅ 151 lines, 8887 chars
🔧 Bash: cat notes/voices.md && echo "=====LLMTELLS=====" && cat notes/llm-tells.md
✅ 44 lines, 2191 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '/round-three\|Round three\|Round 3\|## Voice D/,$p' notes/voices.md | head -200
🔧 Bash: wc -w notes/llm-tells.md && sed -n '1,160p' notes/llm-tells.md
✅ 1 lines, 31 chars
✅ 161 lines, 10036 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && for f in 85-do-not-delay-again.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose…
✅ 23 lines, 2019 chars
🔧 Read redacted: private
✅ 343 lines, 34316 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && ls | sed -n '1,200p'
✅ 89 lines, 2336 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && for f in 25-*.md 26-*.md 27-*.md 28-*.md 29-*.md 30…
✅ 35 lines, 2210 chars
🔧 Read redacted: private
✅ 553 lines, 53972 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && wc -l characters/redacted.md characters/mattie-ordish.md c…
✅ 11 lines, 295 chars — 544 characters/redacted.md / 477 characters/mattie-ordish.md / 627 characters/minor.md
🔧 Read notes/canon/world/timeline.md
✅ 866 lines, 56291 chars
🔧 Bash: redacted sentence: unpublished prose
✅ 25 lines, 3843 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && for f in 40-*.md 43-*.md 56-*.md 57-*.md; do echo "…
✅ 280 lines, 22968 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && for f in 79-*.md 80-*.md 81-*.md 82-*.md 83-*.md 84…
✅ 292 lines, 29794 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && echo "--SORREL frost--" && grep -n "orchard\|terrace\|fourte…
✅ 16 lines, 673 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && sed -n '50,70p' characters/sorrel.md && echo "--FERRIN FILE-…
✅ 97 lines, 5383 chars
🔧 Bash: grep -rn "thousand tons\|tons" notes/canon/ draft/book-01/scenes/ | head -20; echo "---kn…
✅ 18 lines, 1544 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '13p' draft/book-01/scenes/88-ask-me-in-a-month.md unpublished; echo "==="; grep…
✅ 10 lines, 1120 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && cat 85-*.md 86-*.md 87-*.md 88-*.md 89-*.md | tr 'A…
✅ 60 lines, 637 chars
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redacted was 21 Harvestmonth; the 24th is three days after it, not before. "Three days off" reads as forthcoming.
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redacted sentence: unpublished prose Four yards and two feet.'"
redacted sentence: unpublished prose under five yards. He is correcting Sennet's "five yards" and must not repeat it.
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Sorrel asks for forty; Edwin orders eighty. Canon (timeline, Day 46) has eighty set in four labelled sets, so Sorrel's numbers are the error.
→ "Set forty more inside the line uncharmed, and forty outside uncharmed."
4. 87-nothing-to-write.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Mattie has just said "Two stations in and two out"; the one she is asking for is the third outside station (which is what canon calls it).
→ "'You want a third station outside.'"
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redacted sentence: unpublished prose Nothing on the page or in canon makes it the greatest.
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A year ago she had no class at all — her Choosing was Milkmonth, about three and a half months back.
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7. 85-do-not-delay-again.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
On the 26th he has read once; scene 87 unpublished, three days later, calls the 24 Harvestmonth sheet "the boy's first sheet."
→ "who's read his stakes once".
8. 89-the-road-south-east.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose
He told Edwin that at the gate during the field walk, 24 Cornmonth (ferrin.md, ch. 010). In Seedmonth he had not met Edwin; Seedmonth is when he blessed it.
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The six hours at the gatepost were 24 Cornmonth (this scene's own second paragraph: "the day they surveyed it"). Canon reproduces the groundwork's wording here, but the groundwork is wrong.
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Scene 85 unpublished establishes the copperplate as the body of the letter, with the four words in a heavier hand under it. It cannot also be on the back.
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A chain has length, not width, and "inside a chain" is a uselessly loose agreement for two readings nineteen links apart. The real point is that at a yard a day the four days predict 18 links and the readings give 19.
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29 Cornmonth to 28 Harvestmonth is twenty-nine days. The thirty comes from the 28 Cornmonth reading (6 ch 20).
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Nobody left in Fenholt can cast a census; canon has Tess pacing the stakes on the 17th and Mattie chaining on the 24th. It also contradicts Edwin's own scene-40 finding that the edge cannot be measured in grass without the census. The instruction is unfulfillable as written.
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He leaned on [Letters] at nine and is about 350; that is roughly three hundred and forty. Three hundred and thirty is the Wystow-soils figure, imported.
→ "for three hundred and forty years."
16. 88-ask-me-in-a-month.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Same span, same scene, and he has already said "after three hundred and fifty years" nine lines earlier. The round-down reads as a slip rather than an idiom when the exact figure is on the page above it.
→ "Three hundred and forty years. Never fixed it."
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Restated flat, this says a bag went out and came in simultaneously. What is meant is that the protocol copy went out in the bag the boy's sheet arrived in.
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No antecedent. Four ewes died on redacted night and none of them is a Peri milestone; nothing in the read scenes gives her a ewe.
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19. 87 — "It doesn't say for what. I asked. It never says for what."
She has no mechanism for asking the box anything; the day's Weave question is a separate instrument and she has not spent it here.
→ cut "I asked."
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Qualification attached to nothing — not reached is by definition what you write when it is the truth of it.
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The mounting-block scene (81) is redacted's "what specifically goes wrong" — nothing there is about records readable in ten years. The reference has no content for the reader.
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redacted said she had a muster book to close on the 24th (scene 81 unpublished); this is the 30th, and the roster, the reckoning and her secondment are all signed and done.
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23. 88 — "Peri collected the debt that evening"
"That evening" has no antecedent: scene 87 unpublished ends mid-afternoon on the 29th, scene 86 unpublished has already run to the 30th, and this scene is the 30th.
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They leave in four days. As written he commits to a fortnight on the day a lord tells him not to delay again.
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"Spent" does two opposite jobs in one sentence — squandered, then used.
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Circular: a working morning had the start of a working morning in it.
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27. 89 — "I'm not striking him. He's still in the column."
Which column? The book has three and the middle one is the joke.
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28. 89 — Geography. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Three problems: the party is going south-east and joins a north road; "two hundred yards shorter" than what is never said; and the shawl woman is placed beyond the church after they have already gone through Sennet's gate at "the last gate". Either re-order the encounters so the church is passed before Sennet, or name the road he cuts them onto and what it saves.
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30. 88 — "So take the nudge. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose As it stands he contradicts his own doctrine in front of the person he taught it to.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Take the nudge."
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Pepper on a fen farm table is an imported luxury and a claim about the household; the salt is already established on Mattie's table (scene 80 unpublished: "between the bread and the salt").
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32. 86 — "the equinoctial week"
Earth-technical, and the only place in these scenes where the calendar is named in astronomy rather than in the agricultural months the world actually uses. Canon's own phrase is "the equinoctial turn" in Sorrel's mouth; in narration prefer the world's terms.
→ "the turn of the season on the coast".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose That was the thing about ink."
A portable epigram that does not survive restatement — ink is not what makes it unarguable; his having written it is.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose He had written it."
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Shaped abstraction where a plain statement would land harder.
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The clause claims significance and cashes nothing; "grass shows nothing" is the scene's own established fact, already said twice.
→ cut "and gave away nothing".
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Footnoting the effect the line already has.
→ cut "as if he had spoken".
37. 89 — "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Collides with the Weave fragment about Ferrin from scene 40 ("His hands stay at his sides"), which Peri has been chewing on for six weeks. A reader who remembers will read a meaning that is not there.
→ "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
38. 86 — Edwin's four causes, "One. The planting slows it. Two. … Three. … Four. …", 130 words uninterrupted.
This is the recitation-that-should-be-conversation failure, and the numbering is the "Item:" tic's cousin. The list is right; the delivery is a monologue in a scene with three people who each own part of it.
→ Give Mattie cause two (the wet west side is her ground and she has said it before) and let Peri push for four, so he only writes it. Keep the numbers on the page in the book, not in his mouth.
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Four of the five scenes close on Peri writing and ruling. It is the right closing register once, maybe twice; at four in five it stops being a cut and becomes a chime. Two of them should end on someone else's hands — Burl's chalk, Sennet's stake, Tess's poker.
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Three uses of the same construction in four scenes, one of them in Sorrel's letter and one in Edwin's protocol, which makes it read as the narrator's phrase rather than either character's. Keep the protocol sentence (it is the one that is a document) and recast the other two.
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The narration delivers the verdict and then the character delivers it again.
→ cut "and never once caught doing anything but this".
42. 85 / 89 — "That's yours." (Peri, of the sentence) and "That's yours," said Ferrin … "The road, not the field."
The same two words carrying the same kind of weight at the open and the close of the act's last five scenes. Ferrin's is the one worth keeping; change Peri's to "You wrote that."
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The idiom is not one; it reads as a tap or a pump.
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45. 89 — "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Seventy-one is not old in this world (the ages rule), and the number is doing the work that the act should do.
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47. Scene ordering across 85–88. As drafted the sequence runs 26th (85) → 24th–30th (86) → 29th (87) → 30th (88). Scene 86 unpublished overshoots scene 87 unpublished and 88 by a day and a night, so assembly will read as two back-steps. Either end 86 on the 28th and move the Sorrel letters into a scene of their own after 87, or move 87 ahead of the Sorrel-letter section of 86.
Peri's book. Across these five scenes the record is the instrument, the closing gesture, the joke, the emotional register and the plot's forward motion, and every scene resolves into someone writing something down. The act needs one scene in this stretch whose discovery move is not an entry — Sennet's gate opening two hundred yards short, or Burl's chalk under his own name — or the fifth ruled line stops meaning anything. Making it work costs nothing structural: it is a choice about which hands the last paragraph belongs to.