2026-08-30
User:
You are running the pre-David pass on three newly drafted scenes of a novel. Working directory: redacted.
Read, in this order, in full:
- .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md (the checklist you apply)
- draft/book-01/VOICE.md
- The scenes before: draft/book-01/scenes/04-four-minutes.md (the ten o'clock and "calm hands"), 07-can-you-actually-fight.md, 08-what-youre-standing-in.md, 35-boredom-is-the-method.md, 37-what-would-have-to-be-true.md, 38-twelve-stakes.md, 39-read-it-as-six.md
- redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished, 42-a-factors-woman.md unpublished
- Canon, in full: notes/canon/characters/minor.md (Fenholt: Sennet, redacted, the alehouse keeper, the shawl woman and boy, Tess, Burl), notes/canon/characters/mattie-ordish.md, notes/canon/characters/peri.md (Established; Working incl. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
- redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Apply the pre-David pass exactly as the skill says: Part 1 sentence by sentence (restate flat; check every count, fact, inference, viewpoint knowledge; e.g. the station distances and figures at Sennet's; "sixteen yards and eight inches"; eleven standing and one in the barn; Edwin's line about never having gone below two spits — does it parse and is it earned; the compost cantrip: the heap turned, dry-cast, the angry pause, "I'm angry ... I don't know what at" — is the pause earned; whether Edwin "felt it go in" is viewpoint-legal; the box; "Most of them got it at eleven" — check against canon on when farm children get the skill; the counts at the controls; the £9 arithmetic; Peri's household-order speech — is it hers and not Edwin's construction, and does it stay likeable), then one pass each with Parts 2–7. Report findings only — quote, Part/bullet, one sentence why, replacement or "cut". No praise. Do not edit files. End with two lines on any device a second round of comments would be about.
I'll start by reading the skill and voice memo.
🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md
✅ 395 lines, 25262 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md
✅ 151 lines, 8887 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && for f in 04-four-minutes.md 07-can-you-actually-fig…
✅ 344 lines, 29958 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished 42-a-factors-woman.md unpublished…
✅ 206 lines, 16425 chars
Now the canon.
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && cat characters/minor.md; echo "=== MATTIE ==="; cat characte…
✅ 38 lines, 2189 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && grep -n -i -A6 "Fenholt" characters/minor.md | head -200
✅ 57 lines, 2937 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && sed -n '126,320p' characters/minor.md
✅ 195 lines, 11912 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && cat characters/mattie-ordish.md
✅ 477 lines, 27438 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && wc -l characters/peri.md characters/edwin.md world/farm-teac…
✅ 9 lines, 242 chars — 1330 characters/peri.md / 971 characters/edwin.md / 276 world/farm-teaching.md
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && cat world/farm-teaching.md
✅ 276 lines, 17359 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && grep -n -i -B3 -A25 "Where skills come from" system.md
✅ 29 lines, 1754 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && grep -n -i "eleven\|at ten\|farm child\|child gets\|age" sys…
✅ 141 lines, 9686 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && grep -rn -i "eleven\|twelve\|child\|children\|young" world/f…
✅ 14 lines, 1315 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && cat world/magic-explained.md
✅ 301 lines, 16987 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && grep -n -i -B4 -A25 "Sennet" world/silent-soil.md | head -12…
✅ 160 lines, 9989 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && grep -n -i -B3 -A20 "coinage\|corn factor\|nine pound\|£9" w…
✅ 120 lines, 7879 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && sed -n '1,120p' characters/peri.md
✅ 120 lines, 7235 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
✅ 171 lines, 10302 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01 && grep -rn "willow root\|bridge" scenes/*.md | head -30; ech…
✅ 29 lines, 9495 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01 && sed -n '25,50p' scenes/28-fifty-guesses.md; echo "=== REMA…
✅ 35 lines, 2692 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01 && sed -n '80,170p' REMAINDER.md; echo "=== SCENES TAIL ===";…
✅ 152 lines, 12100 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01 && grep -n -B4 -A30 "binding list\|Act-two binding\|act two b…
✅ 4 lines, 428 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01 && sed -n '130,160p' SCENES.md; echo "=== FOOT BINDING ===";…
✅ 32 lines, 4065 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01 && awk 'NR>195' SCENES.md | head -120
✅ 20 lines, 1430 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01 && grep -n -i "Farm Magic — Level 1\|second Peri-past\|factor…
✅ 5 lines, 400 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01 && sed -n '73,120p' SCENES.md
✅ 48 lines, 3171 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && grep -rn "wrists" *.md
✅ 8 lines, 1973 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && grep -n -A70 "Voice rules\|^## Voice" characters/edwin.md |…
✅ 71 lines, 4746 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && sed -n '558,720p' characters/edwin.md
✅ 163 lines, 10264 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon && sed -n '1,75p' world/silent-soil.md; echo "..."; sed -n '155…
✅ 122 lines, 7054 chars
Findings only, per scene, Part 1 first.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Three depths into six spits is two per depth, but every station is then reported as a triple ("nought, nought, nought"; "fourteen, eleven, nine") and line 31 has "the deep spit", singular. The arithmetic and the results contradict each other. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
2. "Four yards: nought, nought, nought." / "Twenty yards: fourteen, eleven, nine." — Part 1, dependents of an established rule. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Count their works instead."* Three worm-figures per station is the column he banned four days earlier, and line 25 has already said the counting was done his new way. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Old channels in both deep faces, and not one of them open."* The scene title inherits the same problem.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted"* — Part 1, viewpoint/fact. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Eight inches is finer than a foot, and no method is shown. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Not here, not at the block, not in three hundred years, because in three hundred years I never had ground that read nought to put a spade in."* — Part 1 (a sentence that empties itself) and Part 2. The subordinate clause makes the main clause vacuous: he has never done it because there was never an occasion, so it is not a fact about him. It is also not true of today — line 67 says the deep spits were cut to two spits, so nothing changed. And "Write that. Not as a finding. As a thing I haven't done" is the "nothing happened" fault: it records a non-event as though it were weight. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
5. "They dug at first light" … thirty-six spits at six stations, with Peri going through each by hand, before the street is up — Part 3, would this happen. Scene 35 makes six spits a substantial piece of a morning; six stations of six is six times that, inside roughly ninety minutes of half-light, under a condition that it be finished unseen. Cut the station list to four (4, 8, 12, 20) and let the 40 and 80 be walked and cast rather than dug, or move the far stations to a second, sanctioned morning.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Nothing has put him down; the astride cast is not described as kneeling and the trowel walk is absent (see 3). Fix by restoring the trowel walk, which supplies the posture.
7. "Twenty yards: fourteen, eleven, nine." — Part 1, check every count. Scene 35's control counts were "Fourteen. Nine. Eleven." The same three numbers reappear reshuffled, and Edwin is a man who reads columns for a living; the coincidence will read as the author's, not the ground's. Change one figure (canon fixes only that this station is "a market day" at that depth).
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Not after. Not in a letter."* — Part 5, recitation that should be conversation. Four terms arrive in one unbroken sixty-word speech and are met with "Agreed to all of it." The scene's whole move is the dig done on the owner's terms; delivered as a list, the terms cost nobody anything. Rebuild as an exchange — Sennet gives one term, Edwin agrees or counters, Sennet adds the next because the first was taken too easily.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The same word opens two clauses of matched length at a moment that lands on feeling. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Denying the connection in the first sentence is the strongest possible way of putting them in one sentence. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
11. "you've had it at somebody's elbow with your wrists soft" — Part 1, check who was in the room. In scenes 07 and 08 Peri sits on the bench and asks questions; Edwin is at Widow Sepp's elbow, not hers, she never casts, never handles the heap, and by scene 10 she has stopped attending. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
12. "He watched her wrists. They were all right; they had been all right in the class garden, and Sorrel had said so at the gate." — Part 2, the explained joke, and Part 5, redundancy. Sorrel's "Her wrists are all right" in scene 08 is a verdict on the person delivered in farm-mage shorthand; narrating it here as a literal wrist assessment flattens it, and line 59 then delivers the same fact again as Edwin's closing line. Cut everything after the semicolon.
13. "I've been angry since Sennet's gate this morning and I didn't notice until now." — Part 1, an inference from nothing on the page. Nothing at Sennet's gate gave her anything to be angry at: her question worked, Sennet came, the dig happened, and she got a finding. The pause is the scene's centre and it is standing on an off-page cause. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Not at him. I don't know what at."*
14. "He felt it go in." — Part 1, viewpoint-legal. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
15. "Blue text opened in the air over the heap." and "She looked at the box, which was still there." — Part 3, the System's surfaces. Canon: boxes are private, visible to the recipient, and displaying one to another person is the recipient's deliberate act. As written Edwin reads Peri's box uninvited. Either have her call it up for him (a beat worth having — she shows him without being asked) or narrate it off her face and let her read it aloud.
16. The box arrives on the instant of the successful cast — Part 1 / Part 5 device. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Landing it on the cast is the one version canon rules out. Move it: she casts, nothing happens, he says leave it alone, she is stacking the fork or washing at the trough three paragraphs later, and it opens then.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Twenty and a hundred, forty lines apart, for the same threshold. Make both twenty.
18. "Most of them got it at eleven." — Part 1, check every fact, and the justification test. His own class is eleven grown farmwives from the west parishes getting the cantrip for the first time this fortnight; the sentence is contradicted by the room he teaches every morning. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
19. "That's the whole of the course. Six days. Leave it alone." — Part 1, the wrong noun for a real thing; this is the ruled complaint verbatim ("Does he have a 'compost course'? redacted sentence: unpublished prose The course is five spells over six weeks; six days is the cantrip. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Six days. Leave it alone."
20. "in a hand that had steadied since the bridge" — Part 1, a reference with no antecedent. Nothing anywhere establishes her hand as unsteady at the bridge; her hand injury is arcs away. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
21. "and did not offer to help, which Edwin thought was the most tactful thing he had seen the man do." — Part 2, the footnoted joke. Burl standing there with a fork and not using it is the joke; the gloss says so. Cut from "which".
22. "I felt the — there was something to feel. Not the tilt. Something else." — Part 2, the had no words for family. Three attempts that name nothing, and Edwin does not answer it, so the reader gets no purchase either. Either give it the heap's own terms ("It went somewhere. redacted sentence: unpublished prose It took."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The two-o'clock list is 24 Cornmonth; the controls run on the third morning after the stakes of the 25th, which is the 27th. Three days. Replace with "three days ago".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Sennet's terms in scene 40 were that nothing gets said about his ground until he says it, and nothing on the page has him say it. Eleven is nine plus his two; Peri is announcing his stakes to the parish on his second day. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Six spits at three depths is two per depth, not three figures; and the noughts at the two lower depths are the column Edwin refused in scene 35. Fix in the same way, and let the deep faces carry old-works/fresh-works as line 15's own second clause already does.
26. "It drew eleven people." / "in front of eleven witnesses" — Part 1, count and repetition. The named figures come to nine or ten depending on whether Peri and Edwin count, and the same number is asserted twice for two different sets (people present vs. people who watched the null). Eleven is also carrying eleven farmwives, eleven casts, eleven stakes and eleven entries elsewhere in the book. Make one of them a different number and let the other stand: "It drew a dozen people." … "in front of all of them."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Three stacked conditional clauses, the cumulative "and" pile that canon assigns to redacted, closing on an abstract verdict about the parish's credit — Edwin's register in her mouth. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The biscuit tin was ruled out on 2026-08-30 as nineteenth-century and replaced with an earthenware crock; a tin lid is the same object class two days later. Replacement: a slate, or an old roof tile, either of which also sorts better.
29. "He was glad of it afterwards." — Part 2, the gesture. A forward-flash that tells the reader the moment mattered and says nothing about why. Cut.
30. *"It's not nine pound. redacted sentence: unpublished prose She ends her one big speech on the most quotable sentence in it (the rule-4 defect, imported to her peak) and then repeats it as her recovery line, so the recovery is a reprise rather than a cost paid. Keep the second, cut the first: end the speech on the horse with the shoe off, which is the concrete thing, and let the abstract sentence arrive only after the room has gone quiet on her.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
32. "Whatever the alehouse keeper had heard in her, she had not corrected him, and he had watched her decide not to, and it was hers." — Part 2 and the endings-are-cuts rule. Three clauses of narrator verdict, closing on "it was hers", which claims significance and states no proposition; it also explains the beat the scene has just built to be unexplained. Cut the whole sentence. The scene ends on "stayed there longer than the tins needed. Edwin did not go after her."
33. The Peri-past pointer as a whole — Part 5, the device. The brief requires it to cost her the room for a moment. On the page it costs her two sentences of blush, after which she immediately takes command of the room, gives redacted an instruction, and he obeys and leaves to carry it out. Nothing is lost, so nothing was risked. Make the cost real: let her lose the exchange — redacted answers her question grudgingly and does not go, and the going happens later, off her, at Mattie's word or the alehouse keeper's; or let the room's attention stay on her long enough that she has to ask her question twice into silence.
Two lines on the device a second round would be about.
The instrument-and-column register — spits, depths, stations, triples of worm counts — is now carrying three consecutive scenes and it has stopped being method and started being furniture: the counts contradict each other in three places (findings 1, 2, 25), reuse each other's numbers (7), and are reported in a shape Edwin himself banned four days earlier, which means the columns have become decoration while the character who invented them looks careless. Making it work means fixing the schema once — top spit counts animals, the two deep spits count works, old and fresh, and nothing else is ever a triple — and then spending it in only one of the three scenes, letting 41 and 42 report results rather than procedure; removing it means keeping the schema in 40 and giving 42's controls to the crowd and the talk entirely.