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; 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; 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; the character voice notes).
Scenes: draft/book-01/scenes/43-two-lines-one-field.md unpublished, 44-where-they-stopped-writing.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished, 46-a-list-of-houses.md unpublished (Days 14–15, 28–29 Cornmonth). Read for context the exemplars named in VOICE.md §1 (scenes 01, 06, 05, 02, 13, 19) and the preceding scenes 34–42 in draft/book-01/scenes/. Canon the scenes touch: notes/canon/characters/redacted.md ('How they talk' and 'Voice — binding': piles that run out, attestation, anchors, no epigrams, no balanced two-half sentences), notes/canon/characters/minor.md (redacted, redacted, redacted — 'How they talk' notes), notes/canon/characters/mattie-ordish.md ('How they talk'), notes/canon/characters/peri.md ('How they talk', 'The Peri direction'), notes/canon/characters/edwin.md ('How they talk'), notes/canon/world/institutions.md (the Charter).
STRICT: never read chapters/, rewrite/, draft/book-01/rejected-act2/, summaries/, or plans/book-01/arc-0*.md, unpublished or their git history; do not search for them.
Pay particular attention to: sentences that do not make sense restated flat; counts and clocks inside each scene; viewpoint knowledge (Edwin cannot know what Tess or redacted knew); a joke a character could not sincerely make; Peri staying likeable; gesture-at-meaning lines and the banned family ('the whole of it' etc.); any remaining em dash in body text; dialect/fake-archaic contractions ("I'll not" etc.); each scene's ending (a scene may end on an answer or verdict; a composed button, epigram or cross-scene callback quip is the fault); whether redacted's speeches are her voice (piles, anchors, counts she took) and not Edwin's balanced sentences; whether redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished's board-reading is legible without prior scenes; whether scene 46 unpublished's inventory reads as Peri's genuine curiosity rather than a list dumped for the reader.
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 the 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: cat draft/book-01/scenes/43-two-lines-one-field.md unpublished draft/book-01/scenes/44-…
✅ 200 lines, 26261 chars
🔧 Bash: cat notes/canon/characters/redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
✅ 41 lines, 2181 chars
🔧 Bash: cat notes/canon/world/institutions.md
✅ 42 lines, 2196 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; python3 - <<'EOF' import re def sec(path, keys, ctx=120): t=open(path)…
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n "Charter" notes/canon/world/institutions.md | head -60
✅ 242 lines, 15280 chars — ===== notes/canon/characters/redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose / redacted sentence: unpublished prose /
✅ 30 lines, 2321 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '50,180p' notes/canon/world/institutions.md; echo ===; sed -n '280,…
✅ 133 lines, 7949 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -A30 "How they talk" notes/canon/characters/minor.md | head -150
✅ 31 lines, 2186 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -i "redacted\|redacted\|redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose…
✅ 31 lines, 3158 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -A40 "How they talk" notes/canon/characters/peri.md | head -80; ec…
✅ 72 lines, 4648 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -i -B2 -A30 "The Peri direction" notes/canon/characters/peri.md |…
✅ 106 lines, 6193 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -i -A35 "how they talk" notes/canon/characters/edwin.md | head -60
✅ 59 lines, 3903 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; ls | sed -n '30,50p'; wc -w 3[4-9]*.md 4[0-2]*.md
✅ 27 lines, 751 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; cat 37*.md 38*.md 39*.md 40*.md 41*.md 42*.md
✅ 20 lines, 1833 chars
🔧 Bash: cat redacted: private
✅ 20 lines, 1833 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/40-zero-at-the-three-depths-we-cut.md
🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/42-a-factors-woman.md unpublished
✅ 60 lines, 7448 chars
✅ 48 lines, 7668 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/41-calm-hands.md unpublished
🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/38-twelve-stakes.md
✅ 60 lines, 8280 chars
✅ 54 lines, 6920 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; grep -n "—" 4[3-6]*.md; echo "---wants"; grep -no "wa…
✅ 25 lines, 5248 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/36-write-both.md
✅ 54 lines, 7830 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; grep -n -i "cornmonth\|the [a-z]* day\|twenty-[a-z]*t…
✅ 9 lines, 5021 chars
I've read the skill, VOICE.md, the four scenes, the canon sections named, scenes 36–42 for continuity, and checked the calendar arithmetic across 25/38/42/43–46.
"One line through a curved thing tells you how fast." (opening) — Part 1, explanation stops halfway / a sentence that needs another scene to parse. The maxim as Edwin ruled it has two halves ("...tells you how fast, and two lines tell you what shape"), and the second half is the whole reason this scene exists; quoted at half length the opening states the thing the scene is not about. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"The stump line ran up the field from south-west to north-east and cut the outer arc at nine chains fifty from the stump." — Part 1, check the clock. redacted sentence: unpublished prose So the day-14 geometry sets a four-day-old figure against a west-line figure taken that afternoon, on an edge Edwin believes moves a yard a day, and neither he nor Peri says so. Replace: "...cut the outer arc at nine chains fifty on the twenty-fourth, four days back, which was four yards of growth and no more, and he set it down as four yards short and went on."
"If the arc was part of a circle, and the line ran through the circle's middle, then the middle sat somewhere back down the line, and there was a figure for how far." — Part 1, a word doing a job it cannot do / an inference that does not follow. One line crossing an arc at one point fixes no centre at any distance; you need the arc's curvature, which he has (the nine dated stakes along the leading edge, scene 38, each chained to two fixed marks). As written a reader who can do the geometry stops dead. Replace by naming the input: "He had nine staked points on the leading edge, chained to fixed marks, and three points fix a circle. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"Forty yards is a chain and a half." — Part 1, count. A chain is twenty-two yards; forty is one and four fifths, not one and a half, and this is Edwin, who does not misstate a chain. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Two weeks before the twenty-eighth is the fourteenth of Cornmonth; Edwin was still west of the Ashway bridge on the twenty-first (scene 25) and the stakes were burned 25 Cornmonth (scene 38). Replace: "three days ago".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose So it's the chain, and I can't say more." — Part 1, count, and it breaks a rule the scene has just established. A day's growth is four or five links over; two links under leaves a six-or-seven-link gap on a 137-yard run, where Edwin has just ruled two links the chain's whole tolerance over two hundred yards. Peri's "inside what the chain can't tell" is therefore false by the scene's own arithmetic, and Edwin does not catch it. Replace the figure with "six chains twenty-five" and the speech with: "Five links on from yesterday's, which is a yard, which is what the stump line's been doing. redacted sentence: unpublished prose A yard a day, both lines. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"Mattie ... said nothing, because a number on a new line did not yet mean anything to her and she was not a woman who said things about numbers that meant nothing yet." — Part 1, viewpoint knowledge, and Part 2, a balanced narrator sentence about a woman's interior that Edwin cannot see. Replace with what he can see: "...said nothing, and went back to the yard."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The list specified two new marks; the scene uses her existing gatepost. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"and you'll have all of it, and none of it ranked" — Part 2, banned family ("[amount] of it"). redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Not a cut of the reason - the reason above it stays; the tail goes plainer. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"and Tess came and stood behind Peri." — Part 5, a thread raised and dropped. Tess is placed and then does not exist for the rest of the scene. Either give her the one thing she is for here (she burned the stake letters; she can be the one who fetches the stake log) or cut the clause.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Not a cut of the ending - the scene may end here, on her answer. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Scene 42 unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replace: "the six zeros".
"Whoever's out at the chain chalks it." — Part 1, a word doing a job it cannot do, in a book where the reader met a surveyor's chain nine paragraphs ago and has watched two of them run that morning. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Scenes 43–46 are the tomorrow, and the promise is neither kept nor mentioned. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Recorded here only because the reader will count it.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose A roster is names; it describes nobody, and what he then sees is gear and a shoulder, none of which is on a roster. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Edwin cannot watch Peri notice an absence, and canon has the escort inference as his. Replace: "Edwin watched her file it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"That's the third date I've written for that hill since Haymonth. I wrote the first one too." — Part 1, count, and Part 4, voice. Two dates have been written for the hill (the tenth of Haymonth, and the second of Fallowmonth); the postponement notice on the board explicitly names no date. And the rueful button belongs to redacted, who canon allows one such line a scene; redacted refuses in procedure and never volunteers opinion. Not a cut of the beat - the beat is good and it is his to have. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"and that this was the kind of argument that could not be won because it was not, properly, an argument at all ... redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replace with the plain thing: "...twenty-two years, and sat down like a man who had sat down in that chair on worse days than this one."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replace: "needs twelve on the roster".
"A mouth drawing is what a mouth does until the day it doesn't, and I'd sooner not learn which day that is with six hands on the roster." — Part 4 (redacted.md: no epigrams, no balanced two-half sentences; the definitional "X is what X does" is named as Edwin's). The reason is right and stays; the shape goes. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"Six hands," said redacted, "is what the Charter has. Nineteen on the wall..." — Part 4 (minor.md: redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose His speech opens on redacted's number and reaches his decision last. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Nineteen on the wall...'" - the roster arithmetic and the 1s 8d against 3s follow unchanged.
"It's held forty-nine. redacted sentence: unpublished prose I know what I'm betting." — Part 2, a three-fold rhyme buttoning his turn. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"which was a column that was getting longer." — Part 2, a narrator flourish after the report has landed, and the one place where the pump beat risks being commented on. The rest of the paragraph is correct: it records the thing as seen and not understood and stops. Cut this clause.
"Since Weedmonth, eleven. Nine of those mine. Two were redacted and redacted" — Part 1, count against scene 44 unpublished. The slate carries three lines in three hands over three weeks, and redacted says whoever is out at the chain chalks it; nine walks of redacted's since Weedmonth would put her hand on the slate nine times, not once. Fix it in 46 rather than in 44, since the slate is the better image: "Since Weedmonth, eleven. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted and redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"Nineteen in Cornmonth is two things in the withy bed" — Part 1, the flat restatement equates nineteen with two. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose (The scenes also carry "I'd not send six", "I've not made", "you've not asked" - each is ordinary enough on its own, but four in four scenes is the register creeping back and worth thinning to two.)
"That's what the count is," said redacted. "It's not a count of what's in the fen. I can't count the fen. It's a count of what's got as far as the houses" — Part 4 (redacted.md: the definitional "That's X" and the "That's not X. The X that matters is Y" pair are named as Edwin's, not hers). redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted. 'Nobody can count the fen. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"Nineteen's a number a man can put a date against. The margin's bad is a thing a man can nod at." — Part 4, a balanced two-half antithesis, explicitly not hers; plus Part 6, italics in a weird place. Replace: "'That's why I give redacted the numbers. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"Write it and you'll have written more about a delver's kit than the Charter has." — Part 4, a verdict rounding off her speech, and Part 3, a claim about what an extremely literate institution has never written down. Replace with the attestation: "Write it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Not a cut of the ending, and not because it is a cadence - because it is the second delivery of one fact. Replace with the thing she has actually just learned, which is new: "'In the books nobody keeps a book,' said Peri. 'They go down and come up and somebody tells it after. She's got nine walks and two other people's and a slate on a nail, and none of that would be in a book at all.'"
The inventory (the nine steadings; the kit) — reads as Peri's curiosity, not a dump, because both lists are asked for by her and both are licensed on the page (redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose One place slips: the dogs and the ages arrive in the narrated list before the reader knows why they matter, and redacted's reason for them lands two paragraphs later. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
43. The device a second round would be about: the trowel geometry. It is the whole scene and as written it does not determine a centre from what it says it uses. To make it work, name the nine dated stakes as the arc's points and fit the circle to them, and date the nine-chains-fifty; otherwise the two-middles finding is unearned and the scene has to become Edwin failing to get a centre.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose What would draw a second comment is the second word "chain" in a scene of chained lines, and the eleven zeros; both are one-phrase fixes, and nothing here needs removing.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The second device, Edwin's both-sides-are-right paragraph, will draw a comment as long as it says the argument is not an argument; keep both reasons, drop the frame.
46. The device is the kit inventory, and it survives because Peri asks for it and says why. What a second round would be about is the two closing quips - redacted's "more than the Charter has" and Peri's "in the books" - which are the same move twice in eight lines: a speaker rounding off on a comparison to what is not written. Replace both with the plain fact each is standing in for and the scene ends on an answer, which is allowed.