Run the pre-David editing pass on two newly drafted scenes of a novel…

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2026-09-02

User:

Run the pre-David editing pass on two 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; output 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; findings that cut a reason, answer, explanation or qualification are presumptively wrong unless the thing is nonsense).

Also read draft/book-01/VOICE.md in full (the binding voice memo: exemplars, 'People say what they mean', 'Dialect is off', scene endings, no em dashes in body text - spaced hyphens instead).

Scenes to check: draft/book-01/scenes/41-calm-hands.md unpublished and draft/book-01/scenes/42-a-factors-woman.md unpublished (Day 13 = 27 Cornmonth). Read for context the exemplars named in VOICE.md §1 (scenes 01, 06, 05, 02, 13, 19) and the immediately preceding scenes 34–40 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 redacted sentence: unpublished prose

STRICT: never read chapters/, rewrite/, draft/book-01/rejected-act2/, summaries/, or plans/book-01/arc-0*.md, unpublished or their git history; do not search for them.

redacted sentence: unpublished prose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: is there any device in either scene 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

I'll read the target scenes and context now.

26 tool calls

🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/41-calm-hands.md unpublished && echo "=====42=====" && cat dra…

✅ 107 lines, 15133 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && for f in 34*.md 35*.md 36*.md 37*.md 38*.md 39*.md…

✅ 21 lines, 2211 chars

🔧 Bash: sed -n '1,2000p' redacted: private

✅ 21 lines, 2211 chars

🔧 Read redacted: private

✅ 373 lines, 49896 chars

🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/peri.md

🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/mattie-ordish.md

✅ 975 lines, 64406 chars

✅ 480 lines, 29431 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose

🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && sed -n '/## How they talk/,/^## Voice/p' characters/edwin.md

✅ 76 lines, 4266 chars

✅ 16 lines, 923 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && grep -n -i -A25 "redacted\|fenholt" characters/minor.md |…

✅ 399 lines, 24933 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && sed -n '/^## Skills/,/^## [^S]/p' system.md | head -150

✅ 150 lines, 9269 chars

🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/01-pellings-half-past-twelve-soft.md

✅ 40 lines, 4061 chars

🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/19-the-two-lists.md

✅ 22 lines, 3218 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && grep -n "—\|–" 41-calm-hands.md unpublished 42-a-…

✅ 8 lines, 274 chars

Scene 41 unpublished — "Calm hands"

Part 1 — sense, facts, counts, viewpoint

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose The prevailing wind here is south-westerly (the rest of the book's weather is written that way); a heap on the north side of a yard is in the wind, not out of it. Fix: "against the yard's south-west wall like any other".
  2. "Whatever she had learned on the road, she had learned that" — Part 1, a fact contradicting the sentence before it: the previous sentence says she learned soft wrists in the ten o'clock and in the tower garden, not on the road. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  3. "he found he had no correction to make and said so." then ""Again."" — Part 1, a reply that is not the thing just reported: "said so" promises a line the page never gives, and "Again" is not it. Fix: "Nothing to fix," he said. "Again."
  4. "And why is that the whole of the reason you never cast it cross?" — Part 1, pronoun with no antecedent (she has not given a reason for casting cross; she has just described the air-check), and Part 2's banned family: "'the whole of it' continues to be a weird recurring phrase that you should avoid." Also "cast it cross" is folk-idiom syntax that "Dialect is off" retires. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  5. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  6. "because she's done it more mornings than you've had breakfasts" — Part 1, count that is false: Tess is fifteen and Peri eighteen; Peri has had some thousands of breakfasts. It is also coined folksy idiom of the kind the dialect ruling retires. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  7. "the heap rebuilt a yard to the left of where it had stood" — Part 1, a reference with no fixed point: left of whom, facing which way. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  8. "and that's the trade." — Part 1, an explanation stopped halfway ("a bit too in between explaining and not explaining"), and from the man who has just spent two scenes on controls. Name the mechanism. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  9. redacted sentence: unpublished prose "his to read" is a different bargain from the one on the page. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  10. "Write it in the grey book, would you, with the date." — Part 1 (dependent of an earlier edit) and Part 4: she has just dried her hands, so the wet-hands reason for asking him is gone, and canon has her writing her own boxes into the back of the grey book herself. Fix: have her write it — "She took the grey book off him and wrote it herself, with the date, and the hour" — or give her the reason out loud ("My hands aren't fit for your book").
  11. "because it always comes somewhere stupid" — Part 1, an overstatement not sourced: give her the count she actually has, which is her own register. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  12. "on the thirteenth day" — Part 1, minor: thirteenth day of what is never said, and every other scene in this stretch dates by month ("25 Cornmonth"). Fix: "on the twenty-seventh of Cornmonth".
  13. "Tess knew it from the way Edwin looked." — Part 1, viewpoint: Edwin can report Tess's face, not what Tess knew. Fix: "Tess looked up from the block."

Part 2 — gesture at meaning

  1. "He watched her with more than his eyes" — Part 2: a sentence shaped like significance whose claim is only that something is happening. Name the instrument he actually uses. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  3. "as if it might have changed its mind." (final clause of the scene) — Part 2 / VOICE §2 scene endings: a composed figure closing the scene like a bow. The act is the ending; the "as if" is the button. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Part 4 — character

  1. "Then Tess is at nothing, and I'm at one" — Part 4, Peri must stay likeable: said in front of Tess, this ranks a fifteen-year-old at nothing to her face and nobody answers it, which is the "bit of a brat" register. Her point is about foundations, not about being above Tess. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  2. "That's not a present. That's a second column." — Part 4 (7b: the balanced two-half verdict is Edwin's, banned for her) and VOICE "People say what they mean": "second column" is a callback carrying meaning on its own, unintelligible to a reader who has not read the drill scenes. Fix: "That's not a present. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  3. "It - that's the only word I've got for it. It answered." — Part 4, peri.md 6a: a dash followed by a clause describing the difficulty counts as zero and is banned outright ("perform redacted; never announce it"). Fix: "It - it answered. It heard me and it answered."
  4. Her skill-box speech runs three "and"s in one turn ("points out … and fills in … and if you lean … and I have to decide") — Part 4, rule 1's hard cap of two. Fix: full-stop after "the thing underneath."

Part 6 — weak where it should be strong

  1. "You can't tell a heap to finish that never started." — Part 6: the relative clause is stranded from its noun and the line is the scene's first spoken beat. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Scene 42 unpublished — "A factor's woman"

Part 1 — sense, facts, counts, viewpoint

  1. "as the figures had come out for a fortnight" — Part 1, count against the clock: this is Day 13, they reached Fenholt on Day 9, and the sentence before calls this "the first worm count under the written list". There is no fortnight of figures. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Fix: settle one scheme and carry it through — e.g. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  3. "It'll be off mine." — Part 1, a claim that contradicts the mechanism the scene then explains: if the factor buys the parish as one lot, the next dock falls on Mattie's barley too. As written the grievance does not distinguish. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  4. "the thing he always said at this point, about the wider question and the redacted and Mr Sennet's ground" — Part 1, "always" against content that is specific to this field and this week. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  5. "he had spent a week learning her face" — Part 1, count: it is thirteen days since she came up his hill. Fix: "a fortnight".
  6. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  7. "It doesn't bring the threepence back this month." — Part 1: nothing called "the threepence" has been taken; what was taken is a shilling and threepence, and the threepence is the next one, still hypothetical. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  8. "with the names on it and nothing written against every spit" — Part 1, wrong word against the record: the sheet says zero, on the page and by the standing ruling on that word. redacted sentence: unpublished prose (Same italics point as 34 below.)
  9. "Edwin let the walkers get to the gate" — Part 1, wrong noun: they are the watchers; nobody has been walking. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  10. "'Write it, Tess.'" against "Tess sorted the outside spits" — Part 1, dependents: Tess cannot sort spits and keep the page. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  11. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Fix: "looked at Edwin each time"; "to Mattie and not to him".
  12. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  13. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  14. Check, not yet a fix: "Day zero … The twelfth of Seedmonth." Mattie's chain read 4 chains (88 yards) in late Seedmonth, which at a yard a day puts the edge's start well before the twelfth. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose It means…"

Part 2 — gesture at meaning

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  2. "It went past most of the headland without landing anywhere. It landed on Peri." — Part 2, the announcing repetition that tells the reader to notice, plus a viewpoint claim about eleven faces he was not watching (he says himself he was watching hers). redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  3. "because the next threepence is bought with not knowing, and this sheet is knowing" — Part 2 (a claim made of abstractions) and Part 4 (peri.md 7b: the balanced verdict-in-the-second-half is Edwin's). redacted sentence: unpublished prose This sheet tells him."
  4. "'He'll like being day zero,' said Peri, 'about as much as I liked being level one,' and went up to bed." — VOICE §2: the resolving button — a cross-scene callback that closes the scene like a bow, and a quip Peri makes at her own genuine grievance of that morning, which spends it. Fix: end on the answer the business actually wants: "Does he get told?" said Peri. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Part 4 — character

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Handing it back to Edwin as a lesson taught at dinner takes from her the one independent project the Peri direction requires and makes her the clerk executing his method. Fix: she did it because she thought of it, and she says why when Edwin asks — "A count in ten years is only as good as whoever reads it thinks the counters were. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  2. "They had come because a man called redacted was going to say something" — Part 4/Part 1, viewpoint: Edwin cannot know eleven people's reason in advance. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Part 5 / elaboration

  1. "The first worm count under the written list" — VOICE "People say what they mean": "the written list" is a callback standing for the protocol ruled in scene 36 and means nothing to a reader arriving here. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose It needs one clause of ground, not an explanation. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's brother, not loudly, to redacted. "Whose side is she counting for." — and leave the narration as the fix in 37 has it.

Is there a device a second round of comments would be about? Yes, one in each: in 41, the skill-box exchange, which currently runs on compressed callbacks ("a second column", "the fifty guesses", "the same drill") and asks a reader to import three earlier scenes to hear a woman being disappointed by a reward; in 42, the closing quip, which links the two scenes with a joke and is the composed button the endings rule names.

What it would take: for 41, let Peri say in full what a level-one nudge will now do to her hands and what she is going to do about it tomorrow morning, so the "second column" is a described practice rather than a password, and end on the act with the figure cut. For 42, drop the level-one callback entirely and end on the plain question of who tells Ferrin he is day zero, which is an answer and forward work rather than a bow.