2026-08-30
User:
You are running the pre-David pass on seven newly drafted scenes of the third draft of Book 1 of Autoroad. redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished
,57-the-far-bay-boarded.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished,59-the-slate-at-the-chain.md unpublished,60-its-alive-all-of-it.md unpublished,61-stranger-further-more.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished. For context also read scenes 44–55 in the same directory (do not review those). Consultnotes/canon/characters/redacted.md (Voice — binding: check every redacted line against her sentence shapes, anchors, the retired doubled-insistence form, and the constructions banned for her),notes/canon/characters/mattie-ordish.md,notes/canon/characters/minor.md(Burl, Tess, redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Do not read or cite anything undernotes/sealed/.Report every finding as: file, the exact sentence quoted, the problem in one line, and a concrete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, check every date and every back-reference against the earlier third-draft scenes. Number the findings. No preamble, no praise.
I'll start by reading the skill and the reference material.
🔧 Bash: cat .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md (Read pre-david-pass skill)
✅ 394 lines, 23789 chars
🔧 Bash: ls draft/book-01/scenes/ && wc -w draft/book-01/scenes/*.md (List scenes)
✅ 125 lines, 5134 chars — 01-pellings-half-past-twelve-soft.md / 02-a-war-horse-on-a-milk-cart.md / 03-until-fulfilled.md
🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/VOICE.md (Read VOICE.md)
✅ 150 lines, 8390 chars
🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/56-the-wire-and-the-whips.md unpublished draft/book-01/scenes/… (Read scenes 56-58)
✅ 175 lines, 14758 chars
🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/59-the-slate-at-the-chain.md unpublished draft/book-01/scenes/… (Read scenes 59-62)
✅ 252 lines, 23426 chars
🔧 Bash: cat notes/canon/characters/redacted.md (Read redacted canon)
✅ 41 lines, 2181 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '/^## Voice/,/^## /p' notes/canon/characters/redacted.md | head -200 (redacted voice section)
🔧 Bash: grep -n "^##" notes/canon/characters/redacted.md (redacted headings)
✅ 200 lines, 12471 chars
✅ 8 lines, 321 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '483,560p' notes/canon/characters/redacted.md; echo ===; sed -n '/^\*\*10\./,/^#… (redacted rules 10-12 and rulings)
✅ 64 lines, 4431 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '/^\*\*10\. She does not/,/^## Open questions/p' notes/canon/characters/redacted… (redacted rules 10-12)
✅ 36 lines, 2156 chars
🔧 Bash: cd draft/book-01/scenes && grep -n "Appleford\|milk churn\|milk cart\|five in the morning… (Grep back-references)
✅ 80 lines, 29838 chars
🔧 Bash: ls draft/book-01/scenes/ | tail -8; echo ---; grep -rn "Cornmonth\|Harvestmonth" draft/bo… (Dates and status)
✅ 62 lines, 11479 chars
🔧 Bash: cd draft/book-01/scenes && grep -n "Cornmonth\|days\b\|week" 30-twelve-miles-of-flat.md 3… (Arrival date and re-read 56)
✅ 80 lines, 10263 chars
🔧 Bash: cd draft/book-01/scenes && grep -n "tower\|five in the morning\|at five\|Sennet" 24*.md 2… (Check tower and dawn-visit references)
✅ 26 lines, 6716 chars
🔧 Bash: cd notes/canon && sed -n '1,60p' world/timeline.md; echo "=== months ==="; grep -rn "thir… (Timeline canon)
✅ 81 lines, 5212 chars
🔧 Bash: cd notes/canon && grep -n "Seal\|level\|Level" characters/peri.md | head -40 (Peri Seal/level canon)
✅ 22 lines, 2969 chars
🔧 Bash: cd notes/canon && grep -n "Weave" system.md | sed -n '1,60p' (Weave canon)
✅ 10 lines, 771 chars
🔧 Bash: cd notes/canon && grep -n "cooldown\|thirty days\|Seal of the Loom" system.md | head -30;… (Seal cooldown and dungeon air)
✅ 58 lines, 4111 chars
🔧 Bash: cd notes/canon && sed -n '655,775p' system.md (Weave rules)
✅ 121 lines, 8232 chars
🔧 Bash: cd draft/book-01/scenes && grep -rn "thumbs in" *.md; echo "=== minor ==="; grep -n "Burl… (Gesture ownership and Burl/Tess canon)
✅ 11 lines, 1931 chars
redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The evidence contradicts the reading built on it.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose 'It's on it.'"
Two clauses that cancel: a quarter mile from the margin and on the margin. (The narration four paragraphs later gives the quarter mile as the distance from the near pasture, not the margin.)
redacted sentence: unpublished prose 'It's on the margin.'"
3. 57-the-far-bay-boarded.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Wrong count. Day 1 = 15 Cornmonth (world/timeline.md); the hay's "nine weeks" in scene 31 pins his arrival at 23 Cornmonth; 8 Harvestmonth is fifteen days later. Scene 61 unpublished, two days on, says "eighteen days" — which is the right order of magnitude and makes this one visibly wrong.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"The ten days since" reads as ten days since the eleventh of Cornmonth, which is twenty-seven days back. And "a shade behind it" here fights "ten days behind" in the written note below.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Same collision: on the page the outer band is a shade behind the parish, not ten days.
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6. 57 — "the colour of barley in Weedmonth, in Haymonth, in Haymonth."
The fact is correct against scene 48 unpublished (mid-Weedmonth; three weeks after; a fortnight after that) but on the page it reads as a repeated word, i.e. a typo.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
He has just ordered it behind a locked door as not sold, not fed, not seed — he is telling her not to. The clause does not survive flat restatement.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
8. 59-the-slate-at-the-chain.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Her own chalk two paragraphs above reads 7th. Seven. Out, harder. and she has just written 10th. Half past ten. Out. — i.e. the same as the fifth. If today were the seventh's equal she would have written "Out, harder".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"Walking anywhere" is not a thing the sentence can mean.
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10. 59 — "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose … Then she hung the slate back on its nail."
She never takes the slate down; only the chalk is unhooked.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Five and a quarter miles (scene 55 unpublished) in "a little under two hours" is under three miles an hour — an ordinary walk. The joke asks the reader to do a sum that undercuts it.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
12. 61-stranger-further-more.md unpublished — "Fellowship's sixty miles south-east."
Scene 54 unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose Direct contradiction eight scenes back.
→ "Fellowship's fifty miles south-east."
13. 61 — "Four to redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Six or seven to Wystow. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Today is the tenth. Four days there and back from redacted is the fifteenth at the latest; nothing in her own numbers yields the eighteenth "at best". A reader who checks her arithmetic — and she is the character whose warrant is arithmetic — finds it doesn't close.
→ "Four to redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
14. 61 — "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
The coughing and pointing-out are redacted's, but the nearest subject is redacted and the sentence hands her both.
→ "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted stood over him. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
15. 61 — "the counts for four months, redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"In days from a fixed start" belongs to register dates (scene 39), not to counts of things taken off a margin. The qualification is attached to the wrong item.
→ "the counts for four months, redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Count them: four in the withy bed at first light (59), two at redacted (60). Six. The three at the bed's edge were yesterday evening (58). redacted sentence: unpublished prose
→ Either make it "at six places today" (and "P.M. was there for all six"), or add the missing placings on the page in 59/60.
17. 62 — "the mouth of Holm Deep five miles behind him".
He is on "the last two miles" of a five-and-a-quarter-mile causeway; the mouth is three miles behind, not five.
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18. 62 — "You've had it since the church tower at Appleford".
Appleford's tower is Edwin's — the tower yard, the tower road, the germination racks (scenes 24, 25, 26). The church is a separate building mentioned in passing. He has named the wrong tower, and it is his own house.
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19. 62 — "and you stood at a redacted and had a man come to you at five in the morning who'd said no".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted conversation was a different day in his own yard (37).
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Two counts of the same event, both said aloud, that don't agree.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
21. 56-the-wire-and-the-whips.md unpublished — "setting whips, W side, 41st of the second forty".
The "forties" in this scene are yards ("the first forty yards himself… the next forty"), and the redacted at the end holds "forty whips". Three different forties, and the 41st item of a forty cannot exist.
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22. 60-its-alive-all-of-it.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Four foot of what dimension? The clause about width immediately after makes the reader guess, and Edwin's dictated note repeats the ambiguity ("four foot of water, straight").
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23. 60 — "That's not that. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Three "that"s doing three different jobs in eleven words.
→ "It isn't redacted. Write that redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
24. 56 — "and he watched her not ask and thought it was the most expensive thing she had learned on this road."
The claim is "something is meaningful here" and the metaphor's currency isn't paid: nothing has cost her anything in the scene.
→ Cut, and end on "she went back to the whips."
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Two figures for one thing, stacked; the second cancels the first.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"The other" has no antecedent — the reader cannot say what the other quiet is being called.
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redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Wire fencing is nineteenth-century — drawn wire in field quantities, and the straining of it, is exactly the biscuit-tin failure. This world is pre-industrial and its fencing is cleft chestnut pale, post-and-rail, or hurdles. It is load-bearing here: title, expense, and a line of dialogue.
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28. 61 — "Nineteen. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Three over sixty."
Three men over sixty being off a delve roster uses an age under a hundred as a marker of decline — the flagged move. Worth confirming it is what scene 45 unpublished established; if it is only here, replace with something that distinguishes ("three that redacted won't roster underground since the Ashway").
29. `59 — "In ten years somebody'll want to know a woman stood here with a candle."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
→ "Write the candle. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
30. 59 — "It'll have moved. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
This is the retired round-1 doubled insistence: the identical clause twice inside one short speech as emphasis. The surviving 6b form brackets a whole speech or somebody else's evasion, once a scene. (The canon file quotes this line from the groundwork; the 2026-08-27 revision overtook it — Part 7's "flag any reused line that a ruling has overtaken".)
→ "It'll have moved. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
31. 59 — "Stand here. Face it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Bare imperatives with no name and no attested count on them: ruled to belong to nobody (6c, revised). Three in one scene makes the scene voice-neutral at its centre.
→ "Stand where I'm standing. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
A fact already delivered, redelivered in the same mouth in the same scene.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Strip-the-last-clause: the speech gets better without it, so the clause is Edwin's — a wry verdict tail on a pile that had already run out.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted twice."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose It goes to the walls."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Canon's own phrasing of the same fact (dungeons.md) is hers: a trailing clause, not a rule.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
35. 60 — "Then the question's mine. Not the ground's. … and that's mine, and the ground's yours."
Two breaks in her key speech of the arc: the "Then [X]" derivation is Edwin's (edwin.md 12, and round 3 records her losing a line to it), and it closes on a balanced verdict instead of running out.
→ "The question's mine, then. redacted sentence: unpublished prose You put the twigs in. I'll walk them."
36. 61 — "Then get me the hands."
Second "Then [X]" in her mouth inside two scenes.
→ "Get me the hands, then."
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Verdict tail; strip test passes.
→ "It's older than the causeway."
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Same shape: a general rule closed with a verdict.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose We're on the top."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"Thumbs in her belt" is redacted's established gesture (scene 46 unpublished), and it is given to redacted twice more in the next twenty paragraphs (59, 60). Wrong owner, then used twice more — the description rule is one noticed thing, never twice.
→ Give Burl his own (he is at the fork, the spade, the redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted uses.
40. 60 — "'It's alive,' he said. 'All of it.'"
Verbatim repeat of scene 58 unpublished's "'It's alive,' he said, standing. 'The ground's alive. All of it.'" — and it is scene 60 unpublished's title. The hand-in-the-mud reading now runs in scenes 41, 53, 58, 59 and 60; on its fifth outing it needs to be doing something new or be reported rather than staged.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Loud as the bed. Write that it's not redacted."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose And nothing after it."
"…and nothing after it" twice in consecutive scenes as the same instruction. It is the good device of the book (record without inference) rendered as a catchphrase.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
The "write it and nothing after it" instrument. It is the spine of these seven scenes and it is very good, but across 56–62 it is issued as an order by Edwin six times, and twice in the identical words. A second round of comments would be about the device, not the lines: the fix is to stop staging it and start showing it as established practice — Peri already withholds inference on her own in 53 and 60, and redacted runs her own version of it. Give the instruction on the page once more at most (redacted's candle), and let the other five instances happen silently in what Peri writes.
redacted's scenes 59–61 as a block. With findings 29–38 unfixed, her three biggest scenes carry Edwin's shapes at every one of their beats — the argument for the record, the derivation, the verdict tails — while her own instruments (the anchored short line, the pile that runs out, the roster that doesn't fit the question) are present but never at a peak. If the fixes above are applied as written, that resolves; if they read as shuffling, the answer is to move one of her attestations into the beat position instead of rephrasing the verdict.