2026-09-02
User:
Run the pre-David editing pass on four newly drafted scenes of a novel in redacted. First read the whole of .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md and follow it exactly (Parts 1–7; findings only, each with quote, the Part/bullet it fails, one sentence why, and a concrete replacement or 'cut'; never write 'clean'; do NOT edit any file — report only; a finding that cuts a reason, answer, explanation or qualification is presumptively wrong unless the thing is nonsense or does not fit, and the finding must say which).
Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md in full (exemplars; 'People say what they mean'; 'Dialect is off'; scene endings; no em dashes in body text - spaced hyphens instead; character voice notes).
Scenes: draft/book-01/scenes/47-dont-tell-me-yet.md unpublished, 48-the-eleventh-of-cornmonth.md unpublished, 49-the-middles-walk.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished (all Day 16 = 30 Cornmonth). Read for context the exemplars named in VOICE.md §1 (scenes 01, 06, 05, 02, 13, 19) and the preceding scenes 40–46 in draft/book-01/scenes/. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
STRICT: never read chapters/, rewrite/, draft/book-01/rejected-act2/, summaries/, or plans/book-01/arc-0*.md, unpublished or their git history; do not search for them.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Finish with two lines per scene: is there any device a second round of comments would be about, and what would it take to make it work or remove it.
I'll start by reading the skill and voice memo.
🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md
🔧 Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md
✅ 257 lines, 16258 chars
✅ 426 lines, 27364 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && wc -w 47-dont-tell-me-yet.md unpublished 48-the-e…
✅ 7 lines, 197 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && for f in 47-dont-tell-me-yet.md unpublished 48-th…
✅ 132 lines, 22027 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && for f in 40-*.md 41-*.md 42-*.md 43-*.md 44-*.md 45…
✅ 23 lines, 2229 chars
🔧 Bash: cat "redacted: private"
✅ 23 lines, 2229 chars
🔧 Read redacted: private
✅ 373 lines, 50704 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && cat mattie-ordish.md && echo "@@@@@MINOR" && cat…
✅ 45 lines, 2240 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '1,400p' mattie-ordish.md
✅ 400 lines, 23068 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '400,600p' mattie-ordish.md; echo "@@@MINO…
✅ 119 lines, 7198 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && awk '/## How they talk/,/^## [^H]/' peri.md | hea…
✅ 103 lines, 5651 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && awk '/## How they talk/,/^## /{print}' edwin.md |…
✅ 1 lines, 64 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && grep -n "How they talk" edwin.md && sed -n "$(gre…
✅ 6 lines, 201 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '474,560p' edwin.md
✅ 87 lines, 5421 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '560,660p' edwin.md
✅ 101 lines, 6315 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01 && grep -n -E "^\| *(4[4-9]|50)" SCENES.md | head -30; echo @…
✅ 26 lines, 1172 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/world && grep -n -i "month" timeline.md | head -60; echo @@@; g…
✅ 72 lines, 5193 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/world && sed -n '210,240p' silent-soil.md; sed -n '45,60p' sile…
✅ 68 lines, 4191 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/world && sed -n '130,200p' timeline.md
✅ 70 lines, 4103 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && grep -n "—" 4[789]-*.md 50-*.md; echo "@@@dialect";…
✅ 8 lines, 2587 chars
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, "check every count." Scene 47 unpublished dates the three inner bands: inner ring = Weedmonth (~10 weeks back from 30 Cornmonth), third band = start of Haymonth ("seven, eight weeks"), second band = back end of Haymonth ("five or six weeks"). The list must be ten, eight and five; "three weeks" is the outer band's lag behind the parish, which the same speech then uses again two sentences later. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
49 — *"The inner ring stopped in Weedmonth. The outer stopped on the eleventh. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, "check the clock." Mid-Weedmonth to 11 Cornmonth is 56 days on this calendar (Weedmonth, Haymonth, Cornmonth; timeline.md), i.e. eight weeks, not ten or eleven. Forty-odd yards in eight weeks is five yards a week. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, self-contradiction: he says four and then calls it five, and Peri writes four. One figure, used three times. Make all three "five yards a week" (per the corrected eight weeks above).
49 — "The inner ring's three points are a hundred and sixty yards apart and its middle is good."
Part 1, "check every count," and it contradicts the scene itself: scene 47 unpublished fixes the inner ring at sixty yards across, so three points on it cannot be a hundred and sixty yards apart. The real reason a small ring fits well is that the three points spread right round it, while the outer arc shows only a shallow segment. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, clock and self-contradiction: an afternoon versus an hour, and "a wrong answer" versus an answer he got right. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, dependents of a fact already on the page: scene 42 unpublished has the same docking "at the start of the month." The eleventh is not the start of the month, and the eleventh is what this whole scene turns on. Either 42's phrase becomes "a fortnight since" or this becomes a second visit; the scenes cannot both stand. Flagging for a ruling, not proposing a change to 48.
48 — "Green, even, a hand over his head, the best stand he'd seen in the parish"
Part 1, "a fact overstated into a falsehood," and a farming error: barley does not stand above a man's head. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted" is fine.)
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, count and self-contradiction: nobody saw anything on the twelfth — the eleventh was seen by her and the factor's man, the thirteenth by her alone; and she is one of the two, so the date is partly hers. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Thirteenth, edge going, seen by me. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
50 — "Because I'm doing it tomorrow, before the outer band's ready, so there's nowhere to put it but where I've said."
Part 1, no single flat restatement: boarding one bay does not remove the other places the crop could go, so the "nowhere to put it" does not follow from doing it tomorrow. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, phrasing that will not restate: "three times into an arithmetic" is not a thing a person is. Replace: "by a man who has done the same arithmetic three times because he doesn't like it."
49 — "So it isn't a circle," said Peri. "You said that on the fourteenth. redacted sentence: unpublished prose This is the somewhere else."
Part 1, "check every inference." The fourteenth's option two was a very large circle centred outside the field; a middle that walks north-east across the field is neither of the two he gave. Calling it "the somewhere else" makes a fit that is not one, and the reader who followed 43 will notice. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, wrong verb: a chain and three marks are not built. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
49 — "He did it on the day the bands went over"
Part 1, wrong noun for a real thing: the parish went over; the field did not go over, it showed bands because it had stopped. Replace: "He did it that same afternoon, in the last of the light, on the headland."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, clock: this is a quarter past seven in the morning; the dinner hour is midday. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, "does the justification distinguish?" Everyone on a farm is up early; Burl and Tess are up too. Give the reason that is hers: "because the top field is the first thing she looks at, and has been since Seedmonth."
47 — "I've looked at barley for fifty years" (and the narration's fifty in 48's setup)
Part 1, "scale against canon" / Part 3, ages: Mattie is about fifty (mattie-ordish.md, Established). Fifty years of looking at barley starts at birth. Replace with "forty years." (Canon carries the same "fifty years" phrase from ch. 013; by the "groundwork wording is not canon" rule that binds nothing.)
47 — "and I've told you the date I cut the hay"
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Either put the date in her mouth here — "I cut that hay on the ninth of Weedmonth and it's on the door" — or drop the claim that he already has it.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted"*
Part 1, "a cause left out." A stopped crop standing taller than the neighbour's is a finding, and neither Edwin nor Mattie says a word about it, in a scene where every other colour difference is dated. Either have Mattie's reading account for it ("It's taller than redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
48 — "I'd written to you a fortnight before and heard nothing"
Part 1, check the clock across scenes: a letter written ~27 Haymonth reaching the tower on 19 Cornmonth (timeline.md, Day 5) is three weeks in the post, where Wystow's is five days. Flagging for a ruling — either the letter is later ("I'd written to you the week before") or the slow carrier is worth one clause.
48/49 — the afternoon is spent twice.
Part 1, dependents: 48 has him at the kitchen table "for an hour"/"the afternoon" on the arithmetic; 49 has twelve chainings and three runs of dirt geometry "in the last of the afternoon." Twelve chainings across four bands is not the last of an afternoon that was spent indoors. One of the two wants a stated hour.
48 — "and the two things had nothing whatever to do with each other, because she had not known this field existed until the letter came on the nineteenth, and the field had not known her at all. He knew that. He looked at the date anyway." and "Mattie, who did not know what the date meant to either of them and would not have thought it meant anything"
redacted sentence: unpublished prose "The field had not known her at all" is the banned family — a figure with nothing under it. Keep the noticing, cut the gloss (this cuts an explanation, and the ground is that the explanation is the fault: it is the narration telling the reader what to feel). Proposed:
The eleventh of Cornmonth. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Neither of them wrote it. Mattie put the kettle across.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 2, the "did not say" flourish carrying a composed epigram, and "made unnecessary for an afternoon" is a phrase that will not restate flat. It is also the third scene running with this construction (46: "and did not say so"; 42). redacted sentence: unpublished prose
49 — "because a sum you do not want to do is generally the one that is worth doing"
Part 2 / aphorism budget: a portable maxim in the scene's first sentence, spending the whole scene's budget on a general truth rather than his actual reason. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
48 — "Barley doesn't keep a calendar. It keeps a weather."
Part 2 / Part 1: "keeps a weather" is not English and the antithesis is doing the work a mechanism should do. Replace, keeping the reason: "Barley doesn't keep a calendar. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 2, a portable closer at a peak that gestures at an apocalypse the speech has not earned. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
50 — "A man who only writes down what turned out true has a book that's no use to anybody."
Part 5, rule 6c in edwin.md: the composed teaching paragraph's last sentence is a fact and never a proverb, and this is a proverb. redacted sentence: unpublished prose The pages I use are the wrong ones."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, "'nothing happened'": say what kind of nothing, particularly from the man who insists on it everywhere else. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
47 — "Nobody's asked them yet what week the barley thinks it is." — ruling: it fails, and it is Mattie's only line of this kind in the scene.
mattie-ordish.md rule 7a bans any aphorism, antithesis or reversal for her with zero tolerance, and this one personifies the crop, has a second limb, and is printable on its own — it is Edwin's register in her mouth, which the file names as the exact fault (ch. 012's counter-exemplar). It is also the scene's aphorism budget spent by the wrong speaker. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
47 — *"I'll walk it," she said. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
mattie-ordish.md rules 1 and 7e: short declaratives, no subordination; the finite subordinate clause is Peri's separator and Mattie's asyndeton is now her only one (dialect being off). The reason must be kept — the fix is grammar, not content: "I'll walk it first. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
47 — "The outer's three weeks behind the parish."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
48 — Mattie's whole eleventh-of-Cornmonth speech.
Part 5, device: the speech puts a person and a date in one utterance ("The factor's man walked that field on the eleventh of Cornmonth"), carries four dates, and grades a document's value — all three listed under Never in mattie-ordish.md rule 3, and it out-numbers Edwin in his own arithmetic scene. The content is right and must stay; the delivery is the fault. redacted sentence: unpublished prose He stood in the crop. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
VOICE.md, "Dialect is off": first-person "I'll not" is specifically retired ("particularly weird"), and the "'d not" family is the same register three times in two scenes. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 3, chronology of institutions: "first-year" imports year-cohorts at a college into a world where nothing agricultural-formal predates Edwin. Replace: "to a farmer."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
47 — redacted's opening paragraph, and the questions Peri never asks.
Part 5, "a thread raised and dropped": scene 46 unpublished ends with redacted saying "Ask me the rest tomorrow," and here she stands silent for a quarter of an hour, says something the reader cannot cash ("she would want him at the mouth one day, and not today" — VOICE.md, "people say what they mean": a request with its reason withheld), and leaves. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Warning under VOICE.md's retired "wants [gerund]" family; "want to go" for need to go is on the line. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
47 — "Hers is the board."
VOICE.md, "people say what they mean" — compressed to the point of code as the scene's last three words. Elaborate: "Tess wrote them. Her name goes on with mine."
49 — "He did it on the day the bands went over, in the last of the afternoon, on the headland, in the dirt, with the iron trowel, and it took three goes."
Part 6: five prepositional phrases in file order before the verb pays off. "He did it that afternoon on the headland, in the dirt, with the iron trowel, and it took three goes."
silent-soil.md and mattie-ordish.md both record this crop as "nine pound and better" (ch. 013). Eleven acres at four quarters and about a pound a quarter is nearer forty, so the draft's figure is the agronomically right one and the canon figure looks like the docking loss (redacted's nine pound at 1s 3d on forty acres) that migrated; but canon says nine, so it needs a decision before either goes further.47. The device a second round would be about is Mattie's mouth: the scene's whole engine is her reading dated bands aloud, which is Edwin's and redacted's currency, and the "what week the barley thinks it is" line is that leak surfacing as an epigram. To make it work, keep every date but hang each on an act she did (the hand in the crop, the hay she cut, the alehouse keeper's field) and let Edwin do the arithmetic out loud; to remove it, give the week-counts to Tess reading the board back.
48. The device is the eleventh-of-Cornmonth paragraph: as written the narration argues the coincidence away in three sentences and then confirms the significance through Mattie, which is louder than saying nothing. To make it work, cut to the two of them looking and neither writing; to remove it, let the date land with no paragraph at all and trust the reader who has counted from the fifteenth.
49. The device is the dirt geometry as an explanation: the three fixed marks and four fitted middles are followable, but the error argument that justifies them contains an impossible number (a hundred and sixty yards across a sixty-yard ring), and one wrong figure there costs the reader the whole construction. To make it work, restate the conditioning in terms of how far round each arc the three points spread; to remove it, drop the error paragraph and let noise stand on Peri's page unargued.
50. The device is the prediction lecture: the content is right and welcome, but it is delivered to the woman who has just paid for it and who invented the second control, so it reads as teaching aimed at the wrong person. To make it work, address it to the book and to Peri with Mattie's leave — one clause does it; to remove it, let Peri's "which way would you be wrong?" be the only frame the prediction gets.