2026-08-31
User:
Run the pre-David pass on a scene. The brief is redacted/.claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md — read the whole file first and follow it exactly, including the Standing caution (a finding that removes a reason, an answer, an explanation or a qualification is wrong unless the thing is nonsense or does not fit; never propose an ending change on "cadence" grounds; where dialogue is compressed to code, the finding is elaborate, with the elaboration supplied) and the 2026-08-31 additions. Your report is advisory; the main session decides.
Then read, in full:
- redacted/draft/book-01/VOICE.md
- redacted/draft/book-01/scenes/27-the-cellar-at-saltings-corner.md (the scene under review)
- the scenes before it: redacted/draft/book-01/scenes/13-when-did-you-last-leave.md, 25-walking-point.md, 26-a-ceiling-you-recharge-to.md; and the exemplars 05-in-some-sort-of-order.md, 06-the-front-from-the-roof.md
- canon: redacted/notes/canon/characters/edwin.md, peri.md
Read ONLY the files listed above. Do not open, search, glob or grep any other directory or file; do not use grep or find at all.
Context: scene 27 is the evening of Day 7 at the Saltings Corner inn — a small problem solved and priced, and what she files it under. The author's comments on a previous version of this scene (different text, same slot): eel tanks confused him twice (are they literally tanks of eels? why does an inn have them? — the redraft must make them make sense on first mention); Edwin ordering Peri about abruptly was wrong ("Could you please?" register); a flat denial of a thing that was plainly true; an oddly aggressive version of the sixpence/queue line where "I'm only charging you because..." was the intended meaning; and a missing connection between two sentences. Check the redraft against each of those, and: every exchange understandable without the previous scene; reasons on the page; the rest-register (work described as process in the trade's own terms) is correct for the cellar-reading and must not be flagged as a fault; em-dash budget ~2/1000; at most one narrator aphorism; warning-sign constructions ("[amount] of it", "the whole of it", "I'll say it", "to be mine", "it's against you", bare-noun replies, portentous implication, "Item:"); viewpoint knowledge (the scene ends with Peri's notebook entry — check the viewpoint mechanics of how Edwin comes to know its wording); counts and clocks; Peri likeable; no joke a character couldn't sincerely make; figures drawn only from this world's economy and technology.
Report per the skill's "How to report": findings only, quote + Part/bullet + one sentence why + replacement or "cut", Part 1 first; then the two closing lines about any device a second round would be about. Your final message is the report.
I'll start by reading the skill brief and all the listed files.
🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md
🔧 Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md
✅ 232 lines, 14540 chars
✅ 426 lines, 27364 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && cat -n 27-the-cellar-at-saltings-corner.md (Read scene 27)
✅ 35 lines, 6232 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && cat 13-when-did-you-last-leave.md 25-walking-point.… (Read prior scenes)
✅ 167 lines, 19291 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && cat 05-in-some-sort-of-order.md 06-the-front-from-t… (Read exemplars)
✅ 94 lines, 7839 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && cat edwin.md peri.md (Read canon)
✅ 44 lines, 2209 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && wc -l edwin.md peri.md && sed -n '1,400p' edwin.md (Read edwin.md part 1)
✅ 402 lines, 24820 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '400,971p' edwin.md (edwin.md rest)
✅ 36 lines, 2213 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '400,700p' edwin.md (edwin 400-700)
✅ 300 lines, 18691 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '700,971p' edwin.md (edwin 700-end)
✅ 272 lines, 17608 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '1,330p' peri.md (peri part 1)
✅ 330 lines, 20332 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '330,700p' peri.md (peri part 2)
✅ 371 lines, 23979 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '700,1330p' peri.md (peri part 3)
✅ 36 lines, 2189 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '740,1050p' peri.md (peri 740-1050)
✅ 311 lines, 17714 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && sed -n '1050,1330p' peri.md (peri end)
✅ 281 lines, 16742 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && python3 -c " t=open('27-the-cellar-at-saltings-corn… (counts)
✅ 2 lines, 19 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && python3 -c " t=open('27-the-cellar-at-saltings-corn… (em-dash contexts)
✅ 6 lines, 688 chars
Report on redacted/draft/book-01/scenes/27-the-cellar-at-saltings-corner.md.
1. "Peri sat up in the window seat of her room that night with the notebook, the mist standing off the back of the inn the way the landlord had said it did, and made the day's entries."
Part 1, viewpoint knowledge (2026-08-30): the scene is Edwin's viewpoint and he is not in her room at night; and the landlord says nothing about mist anywhere on the page, so the back-reference has no antecedent.
Replacement — move the whole beat to breakfast, where he is: "At breakfast Peri turned the notebook round on the table and put her finger on a heading, because she was pleased with it."
2. "She did not show him the entries, then or later, but at breakfast she showed him the heading of one... Under it she had written: first magic since leaving..."
Part 1, a line that contradicts itself / viewpoint: the narration says he was shown the heading only, and then quotes verbatim the sentences under the heading. He cannot have the wording.
Replacement — she shows him the page, not the heading: "...put her finger on a heading, because she was pleased with it. The drain had gone under LESSONS, not under SIGNS. Under the heading she had written, and left where he could read it: ..."
3. "first magic since leaving"
Part 1, check the clock: they left the village that same morning (scene 25), so "since leaving" is a span of about nine hours, and the entry is written as though a stretch of time had passed. Also it sits oddly against scene 26, where she says she has watched him do more magic before breakfast than she has done since the spring.
Replacement: "first magic on the road, and it was about a drain."
4. "The seven miles from the bridge had taken the whole afternoon, the causeway being a road that let you walk fast and the fen either side being a thing Peri stopped for, twice, to write about."
Part 1, an inference where Y does not follow from X: both "being" clauses are offered as reasons the seven miles were slow, and the first is a reason they should have been quick.
Replacement: "The seven miles from the bridge had taken the whole afternoon, though the causeway was a road that let you walk fast; the fen either side was a thing Peri stopped for, twice, to write about."
5. "Why sixpence? Not why so little. I worked that out on the winch: nobody haggles with a favour, they just feel bad, and feeling bad curdles. Why anything?"
Part 1, a reply/argument that contradicts itself: the winch insight she reports — that a favour leaves people feeling bad — is already the answer to "why anything?", so she asks a question she has just answered. (Also Part 2: "feeling bad curdles" is a figure with nothing under it.)
Replacement: "Why sixpence? Not why so little. I worked that out at home, on the Corrys' well-winch: a big price makes a man argue about it and a small one makes him pay it and be glad. Why anything at all?"
6. "I worked that out on the winch"
VOICE §2, callback phrases never carry meaning on their own — a reader who has not read scene 13 does not know what the winch was. The finding is elaborate; the elaboration is in the replacement at (5): name the Corrys' well-winch and what happened.
7. "The landlord went up the stairs at a pace that suggested the mason was going to hear about the fall of his drain before he heard the end of his own supper."
Part 1, pronoun with no clear antecedent: "he heard the end of his own supper" reads first as the landlord, and the sentence means the mason.
Replacement: "...before the mason had got to the end of his own supper."
8. "'That's sixpence,' Edwin called after him, 'when the drain's proved it.'"
Part 1, reference with no clear antecedent / compressed to code: "it" is the reading, three paragraphs back. Elaborate.
Replacement: "'That's sixpence,' Edwin called after him, 'when they've had it up and it's proved me right.'"
9. "Since the spring they go off their water in three days at that end"
Part 1, a word doing a job it cannot do: "go off their water" reads as refusing to feed, and the meaning is that they sicken and die; it is one of the two places the eel tank has confused a reader before.
Replacement: "Since the spring they sicken in three days at that end"
10. "Has anything been done to the yard since the spring?"
Part 1, does the justification distinguish / Part 4: he has not been down the cellar or smelled anything yet, and he names the yard — the answer to the puzzle — as his first question. It pre-empts the reading the scene then performs.
Replacement: "Has anything been dug or re-laid since the spring? Anywhere about the house."
11. "standing at the north wall with the lamp… He knelt at the wall's foot, worked the old trowel into the joint" / later "Peri, holding the lamp" / "He took the lamp off her."
Part 1, check the dependents: Edwin has the lamp, then kneels and works two-handed, then Peri has it with no handover on the page.
Replacement: after "Yard water — there's straw in the taste of it, and the little sourness that muck gives. Your fen under the floor is clean; the fen never smells of a yard.", insert "He gave Peri the lamp and knelt at the wall's foot," and drop "He knelt at the wall's foot, and".
12. "the assay of salts and sournesses… dung salts, straw sournesses"
Part 1, a coinage where an idiom exists (also Part 6): "sournesses" as a count noun, twice, is a made word doing a real word's job.
Replacement: "the assay of salts and souring" … "dung salts, straw souring".
13. "The taproom did not go quiet, the eel men not being a quiet kind of man"
Part 1, weird phrasing: plural subject, singular "kind of man".
Replacement: "the eel men not being a quiet sort".
14. "which was second-year work and cheap"
redacted sentence
Replacement: "which was the cheapest of the six and the first one he taught anybody".
15. "The far end of it's gone foul"
Part 2, banned family, "[amount] of it".
Replacement: "The far end's gone foul".
16. "We keep the catch alive down there in a slate tank"
Part 3, would they have?: slate is quarried hill stone and the inn is in fen country; a fen inn's live-tank is brick or set stone, and the imported material invites the question the redraft is meant to close.
Replacement: "in a brick tank".
17. "Two casks lost, and the tank, and it would have gone on all winter. The smith at home would have dug up that whole yard to find it and charged for the digging. You found it with your nose and a trowel in a quarter of an hour, and you've asked him for sixpence."
Part 4 / peri.md 1: four "and"s in one speech against her hard cap of two, and the whole speech is built on prices and quantities, which peri.md 3 assigns to other speakers; she has no marker of her own anywhere in the scene (no tally, no false start).
Replacement: "Two casks lost. The tank as well, and it would have gone on all winter. The smith at home would have dug that whole yard up to find it, and charged for the digging. You found it with your nose and a trowel in a quarter of an hour. Sixpence."
18. Em-dashes: five in 1,155 words (4.3/1000) against a budget of ~2/1000. Two are in one sentence of the landlord's.
Replacement: in "gone foul — not damp, we're a fen inn, damp is the trade — foul", use "gone foul. Not damp; we're a fen inn, damp is the trade. Foul." That brings the scene to three.
19. "A favour never finishes."
Part 5 / edwin.md 13: Edwin's aphorism budget in this scene is already spent on "an eel lives in its water and you only look at yours", and this is a second portable epigram in the same speech. The reason must stay; the epigram need not.
Replacement: "and a favour never gets finished — it just sits there between the two of you." (If (18) is applied, the dash count still holds at three; otherwise use a semicolon.)
The device a second round would be about is the closing one: a private notebook, quoted verbatim, in a viewpoint that has no access to it — the scene wants Peri's written verdict as its last beat and the viewpoint will not supply it, which is the same fault the "she showed him the heading" redacted was already trying to paper over.
To make it work, the page has to change hands on the page: she puts the open notebook in front of him at breakfast and he reads it, and the narration reports only what is under his eye — no window seat, no mist, no "then or later". To remove it instead, end on Edwin's answer in the cellar stair and let the entry go unwritten.