2026-09-02
User:
Run the pre-David pass exactly as specified in redacted/.claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md (read it first, in full, and follow every part) on two freshly drafted scenes: draft/book-01/scenes/69-under-barrows-barn.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished. Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md in full first, then the character voice files under notes/canon/characters/ for redacted, Peri, Edwin, Mattie Ordish, redacted, redacted, and minor.md (redacted, redacted, Burl, redacted, redacted, the Puckett brothers, redacted), and scenes 65–68 for the immediate context. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's voice as a new adult (must not converge on redacted's register; she is a warden with her own book, blunt, procedural, unhurried); (d) the bed argument paragraph in 70 — one very long sentence, is it doing work or is it a device; (e) the two endings; (f) dialect (everyone speaks plain modern English; "'ll not" outside first person, "wants [gerund]", "nought" are all off); (g) em dashes in the body (none allowed); (h) LLM tells per notes/llm-tells.md including negative parallelism, counted templates ("I'll say three things"), long compound openings announcing the scene's turn, laconic-verdict endings, naming a thing before delivering it; (i) whether Peri's questions to redacted at the end of 70 are in character and whether the ending is a button. STRICT: never read chapters/, rewrite/, draft/book-01/rejected-act2/, summaries/, or plans/book-01/arc-0*.md, unpublished or their git history. Report numbered findings with the quoted line, the fault, and a proposed replacement. Do not edit any file.
I'll start by reading the skill and the required context files.
🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md
✅ 426 lines, 27364 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md
✅ 257 lines, 16258 chars
🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/69-under-barrows-barn.md unpublished && echo "=====SCENE70 unpublished…
✅ 73 lines, 13347 chars
🔧 Bash: ls notes/canon/characters/ && wc -l notes/canon/characters/*.md
✅ 19 lines, 496 chars — appearance.md / redacted.md / edwin.md
🔧 Bash: cat notes/canon/characters/redacted.md notes/canon/characters/minor.md
✅ 41 lines, 2181 chars
🔧 Bash: grep -n "redacted\|redacted\|Burl\|redacted\|redacted\|Puckett\|redacted\|redacted…
✅ 47 lines, 3530 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '130,300p' notes/canon/characters/minor.md
✅ 170 lines, 10726 chars
🔧 Bash: for f in draft/book-01/scenes/6[5-8]-*.md; do echo "=== $f"; cat "$f"; done
✅ 21 lines, 1995 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '1,400p' redacted: private
✅ 21 lines, 1995 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/68-the-count.md unpublished
✅ 1 lines, 96 chars
🔧 Bash: ls draft/book-01/scenes/ | sed -n '60,80p'
✅ 11 lines, 315 chars
🔧 Read redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished
✅ 46 lines, 8333 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/68-it-buys-you-the-night.md unpublished
✅ 46 lines, 6524 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/66-the-fen-margin.md unpublished
✅ 44 lines, 8795 chars
🔧 Bash: grep -n "order\|obey\|ground\|authority\|boss" notes/canon/characters/peri.md | head -60
✅ 26 lines, 3046 chars
🔧 Bash: redacted sentence: unpublished prose
✅ 1 lines, 106 chars
🔧 Bash: grep -rn -i "bossing\|You'll stay out\|the bargain" draft/book-01/*.md | head -30; echo -…
✅ 3 lines, 202 chars
🔧 Bash: grep -rn "26" draft/book-01/SCENES.md | head; ls draft/book-01/
✅ 19 lines, 1343 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '165,185p' draft/book-01/SCENES.md; echo ---; sed -n '80,100p' draft/book-01/SCENE…
✅ 43 lines, 4004 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; for f in 69-under-barrows-barn.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose…
✅ 18 lines, 3555 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; grep -ln "pump" *.md; echo ---; grep -n "Peri" $(grep…
✅ 17 lines, 3199 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; grep -n "pump" 45-*.md
✅ 3 lines, 660 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; sed -n '1,10p' 45-*.md; echo ...; grep -n "| 45 |\||…
✅ 13 lines, 1731 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -i "recharg\|recover\|regen\|a fifth\|ceiling" notes/canon/charact…
✅ 1 lines, 31 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
✅ 26 lines, 2590 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '315,330p' notes/canon/system.md
✅ 16 lines, 1051 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n "^#\|^\*\*" notes/llm-tells.md | head -60
✅ 13 lines, 727 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '172,230p;263,330p' notes/llm-tells.md
✅ 127 lines, 7388 chars
1. Part 1 (count). "The clearing took six days"
The scene then gives the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth — five. SCENES.md puts the scene at Days 31–35, which is also five. Fix: "The clearing took five days."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
The count in scene 67 unpublished was not done that way: it was killed-and-counted in the dark on one night by people at a post, and read once at noon. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
The paragraph above has just established that the clearing is done in daylight. A lamp line at midday does not parse. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Being at a fifth of his mana is not a reason to have no opinion about mist; the "because" welds the day's weather to a mana ledger that has nothing to do with it. (The mana figures themselves check out against system.md.) Fix: split. "Six on the eighteenth, in one redacted on redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted on the night of the fourteenth"
The hatches went down at twenty to two in the morning; the parish (and canon) calls that night the night of the thirteenth, and this scene calls it the thirteenth two paragraphs earlier. As written the reader dates the flood to the wrong night. Fix: "on the night of the thirteenth".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
If the far end is higher, water cannot stand nine inches deep there; Edwin's plan asserts exactly what redacted's discovery contradicts. This is what makes the barn/water geometry unfollowable, not the fall of the ground (which is clear). redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
A spade cannot see. The figure is a shape without a mechanism. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
8. Part 2 (too clever/oblique). "and had counted eyes she could not count because there were none, and had counted heads instead, and had stopped at thirty."
The reversal is built for the reader, not for redacted reporting at a table. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
9. Part 2 (the claim is not true as stated). "because he had spent three centuries moving water and this was water."
The problem was thirty animals under a floor; it was not water. The aphorism is doing the work a mechanism should. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
10. Part 2 / tell 14 (announcing before delivering). "Thirty-eight's not thirty-eight," she said.
A cryptic drumroll in front of the plain statement that follows two sentences later. VOICE.md: nobody answers or opens with a phrase the reader has to decode. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
11. Part 1 / dialect (f). "because they'll not come at me through water."
Non-first-person "'ll not" — a warning sign under the 2026-08-31 ruling, and here there is no cost to the plain form. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"Did not come back" against a man carted off bleeding reads as "died", which contradicts canon (Ceddy is a hand who put his hand where his bill was going, not a fatality). Fix: "and was not back that day."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Three clauses say the same fact (no reason given) in a row; and "a reason about ground" is a callback word carrying the meaning by itself, which VOICE.md forbids. redacted sentence: unpublished prose It was not about ground. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
14. Part 1 (flat contradiction of the paragraph above, plus viewpoint knowledge). "he had wanted her to, badly, and had not known it until the order was out, and that she had known it before he had, and had gone under the barn anyway, which was hers to decide, because it was not ground and he had said so."
Two faults. (a) "he had said so" is false: the previous paragraph states he supplied no reason and kept the not-about-ground judgement to himself. (b) "she had known it before he had" is a fact Edwin cannot have. Fix: "he had wanted her to, badly, and had not known it until the order was out. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
15. Part 2 / tell 12 (false precision on a beat nobody would measure). "Peri looked at him for the length of a breath."
Fix: "Peri looked at him. Then she unbuckled the sword..."
minor.md, the redacted/redacted ruling: "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's own move in redacted's mouth in the scene immediately before redacted arrives is what makes the two wardens read as one voice. Also: italics on a single word inside dialogue reads oddly (Part 6). redacted sentence: unpublished prose18. Part 1 (a line the reader cannot decode). "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Right."
This is dialogue compressed to code — the act-two failure mode named in VOICE.md. No reader can recover what "fourteen in ten" means. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted. And then the night. Right."
20. Part 2 / tell 14 (announcing the turn before delivering it), and one aphorism too many. "The bed problem arrived with redacted ... redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose One of them is the scene's single permitted narrator aphorism. Keep the second, which is earned. Fix: "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
minor.md on redacted: "demands the form ... redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's move all through 67 and 69 ("a back that can feel its feet is a back that has not been broken through"). It is the single strongest reason redacted reads as a second redacted. Fix, procedural and unhurried, no maxim: "We didn't come at night. redacted sentence: unpublished prose22. Part 3 / VOICE §3 (canon-quoted groundwork lines reused verbatim). "redacted doesn't want your charter." and "Write down that it worked."
Both are quoted in minor.md as records of what the groundwork chapter 019 had redacted say. VOICE.md §3: a canon entry that quotes a groundwork line "is a fact about what happened, never a line to reuse." Fix: keep the facts, write the sentences fresh — e.g. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
24. Part 6 (coy withholding of a name already given). "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted has been named and described in the sentence before; calling him "a man" for one beat is a small trick on the reader. Fix: "and redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
25. Part 5 (the read-back reused as a sentence, not as a ritual). "and stood at the back, and redacted read it: ..." / "'That's it,' said redacted."
Scene 45 unpublished runs: "and stood at the back, and redacted read it: ..." and "redacted ... said, 'That's it'". The device is meant to repeat; the wording should not, or the second occurrence reads as a paste rather than a habit. Fix: change the staging verbs and let the difference be that redacted is watching — "redacted stopped inside the door, and redacted read the arrangement out: ..."
26. Part 2 / tell 9 (balanced verdict clauses). "their own food in the cart, which was correct under the third clause, and their own bedding, which was correct under nothing and was simply what a warden does"
A matched positive/negative pair grading its own beat — the negative-parallelism shape. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
27. Part 2 (footnoting the joke) and the ending. "and redacted, who had plainly not been asked anything by anybody since redacted, told her all of it."
The relative clause explains the joke the questions have already made, and "told her all of it" closes the scene like a bow. Peri's three questions themselves are right — practical, sequential, the mule-pricing engine (peri.md), and the right first thing after a scene of silence. Fix: cut the clause and end on content, not on the summary — "and redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
The device a second round would be about: the two consecutive scene endings. 69 ends on redacted's three-part dictated verdict with her name under it; 70 ends on Peri's three-part question list with a summarising clause under it. Both are lists of three closed by a signature line, one scene after the other, and 67 ends the same way ("That's it") — read together they are a house cadence, which is exactly the resolving button VOICE.md §2 names. Making it work does not need either scene to end earlier: it needs one of the two to end on the plain event rather than the shaped one — let 69 end on redacted out of the gap and dictating, cut before the rhythm closes, or let 70 end mid-answer from redacted (finding 27).
Second device: the compressed-warden register. Findings 8, 10, 16, 18 and 21 are one fault — the two wardens and the narrator all reaching for the same clipped, self-warranting, maxim-capped sentence. If only one is fixed, fix 21: redacted is new, and if she arrives sounding like redacted the reader has no reason to believe redacted is a different institution.