You are running the pre-David pass on three newly drafted scenes of a…

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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:

  1. .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md (the checklist you apply)
  2. draft/book-01/VOICE.md
  3. The scenes before: draft/book-01/scenes/31-the-pantry-door.md, 32-nobodys-going-to-laugh.md, 33-a-man-in-a-robe.md; and, for the study/sample continuity, 17-lid-up-the-whole-way.md, 18-nought-in-every-kind.md, 19-the-two-lists.md
  4. The three scenes under review: draft/book-01/scenes/34-off-the-post.md, 35-boredom-is-the-method.md, 36-write-both.md
  5. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  6. draft/book-01/REMAINDER.md §3 and the act-two binding list at the foot of draft/book-01/SCENES.md.

Apply the pre-David pass exactly as the skill says: Part 1 sentence by sentence (restate flat; check every count, fact, inference, viewpoint knowledge; the chain arithmetic — 4 ch → 6 ch 60 unpublished in eight weeks = 2 ch 60 unpublished; 6 ch 60 unpublished → 9 ch 50 unpublished in nine weeks = 2 ch 90 unpublished; "near enough a yard a day" — check it: 260 links = 57 yd in 56 days; 290 links = 64 yd in 63 days; the worm-count numbers; the nine mole runs; the muck rows — does the paragraph make sense; "Nothing died here. That's not the same sentence as nothing was here" — does it parse; the "no agriculture in it" paragraph; whether "the study" is right for the tower room), then one pass each with Parts 2–7. Pay attention to Part 4 (Peri's theory: does she stay likeable; her line about the man with the book — ruling: she suspects the priest, is wrong, and must not be mocked; Edwin's answer "the other five want looking at" — does it give her a fair test without conceding) and Part 5 (any device: the columns; the list). 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 required materials.

28 tool calls

🔧 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 && cat 31-the-pantry-door.md 32-nobodys-going-to-laugh…

✅ 169 lines, 15216 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && cat 17-lid-up-the-whole-way.md 18-nought-in-every-k…

✅ 107 lines, 15173 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && cat -n 34-off-the-post.md 35-boredom-is-the-method.…

✅ 207 lines, 24459 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose

✅ 43 lines, 2189 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose

✅ 10 lines, 286 chars — 40279 world/silent-soil.md / 27557 characters/mattie-ordish.md / 20925 characters/ferrin.md

🔧 Read notes/canon/world/silent-soil.md

✅ 670 lines, 42638 chars

🔧 Bash: grep -n -i "wireworm\|undersow\|molehill\|cast\b\|chain" notes/canon/world/farming-glossa…

✅ 32 lines, 11199 chars

🔧 Bash: sed -n '100,130p;175,195p;270,290p' notes/canon/world/farming-glossary.md; echo ===; sed…

✅ 75 lines, 4259 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01 && awk '/^## 3/,/^## 4/' REMAINDER.md; echo "=====SCENES"; ta…

✅ 161 lines, 13399 chars

🔧 Bash: grep -rn "study" notes/canon/world/*.md | head -20; echo ===; grep -n "tally\|false start…

✅ 7 lines, 571 chars

🔧 Bash: grep -n "tally" redacted/notes/canon/characters/peri.md | head -30

✅ 12 lines, 904 chars

🔧 Bash: sed -n '640,700p' redacted/notes/canon/characters/peri.md

✅ 60 lines, 3533 chars

Part 1 — sense, counts, facts, inference

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose The field is established as barley undersown with clover in Plowmonth (31, 34), rotation "barley, roots, barley, hay" with hay a different year; you cannot take a hay crop off it this season. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose In one paragraph the control station is both standing barley and stubble. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

3. "in clean bands a hundred yards wide" (34) — Part 1, count. The inner ring is sixty yards across (36) and the outer arc's leading edge is 9 ch 50 unpublished = 209 yd from the stump, with the centre inside the field: four bands fit in roughly a hundred yards of radius, i.e. ~25 yards each. Four hundred-yard bands need a field four times this one. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose He woke her at twenty past four (33), and there is a lantern on the gatepost. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  3. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Standing in a lane does not wet boots; walking wet grass does. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

7. "waited there twenty minutes doing nothing" (34) — Part 1, "nothing happened" when the next three paragraphs are Ferrin, Mattie, Burl, the chain and the light coming up. Fix: "waited twenty minutes for the light."

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Running from the gatepost gives a distance from the gatepost; the recorded number is from the stump, and the line's total length is never given. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished is stump-to-edge). redacted sentence: unpublished prose

10. "Nought at either depth they cut." (35) — Part 1, contradicts the paragraph two below it, where the deep faces have "plenty" of old channels, and contradicts the column Edwin has just defined (deep = works, not worms). redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

12. "Nothing died here. That's not the same sentence as nothing was here, and I want both sentences in the book" (35) — Part 1, two flat restatements and no way to choose: he asserts the first, then asks for both to be recorded as though undecided. Fix: "No bodies. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  3. redacted sentence: unpublished prose All eleven land before eleven; "before noon" understates by an hour it is odd to lose. Fix: "eleven times before they ate."

16. "It cost him nothing worth counting." (35) — Part 1, dependent of scene 18, where eight castings in an hour were "a dent" and put him on the stool. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

18. "'Wasn't anything there in Seedmonth. It was a field.' … 'The grass was good all over.'" (35) — Part 1, wrong noun for the real thing: on 12 Seedmonth the field carries a young barley braird, not grass. Fix: "The braird was good all over."

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose In 17 the block was in a box on a bench and the beds were at the foot of the tower; there was no continuous ground and no edge to hear. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Scene 19 gives the object of both frights as "the spring", a season; the months named (Mudmonth, Plowmonth) were the thaw's, not the fear's. Fix: "and the noun was the spring."

  3. redacted sentence: unpublished prose They have measured one line. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Ask me again when we have two."

  4. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Also not her tally (which counts her own utterances, peri.md 6d), so it costs her likeability for nothing. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  5. redacted sentence: unpublished prose The six revealings were cast in the study on the Wystow block, not here; and none of the six looks for a working — they assay salts, water, blight, taint, exhaustion and life. As written his strongest argument does not follow. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

24. "Ask Mattie which five." (36) — Part 1/Part 4, wrong source. Ferrin is sixty yards off, has offered to answer anything with a fact in it, and blessed the fields himself. Fix: "Ask Ferrin which five."

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  3. redacted sentence: unpublished prose 9 ch 50 unpublished plus a yard a day for thirty days is 10 ch 86 unpublished. Keep the prediction (it is the one canon later grades) but mark it as a guess. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  4. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  5. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Cut.

  6. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted. Peri has had the grey book since 34 and is writing in it at line 45. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  7. redacted sentence: unpublished prose It reads as personification in a plain establishing sentence and the flat version is only "it rises slightly". redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Part 2 — the gesture at meaning

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  3. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  4. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Cut the relative clause.

  5. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  6. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Part 3 — would this exist in a real world

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Fix: "the ten thousand small trades a handful of ground is making while you hold it."

39. "It's flat like a lawn." (35, Mattie) — a figure from an ornamental grass plot in the mouth of a fen tenant describing her own barley. Fix: "It's flat like a road."

40. Author's notes owed at this chapter. Per farming-glossary.md, Wireworm, Casts and molehills and Undersowing / clover are all logged as explained at this point in the story and none is glossed here; The chain is deferred to the next chapter and should stay deferred. Not a prose fix — flagged for assembly, where the note attaches to the worm-count and molehill work.

Part 4 — why would this character do or say this

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose She made this case in 33 ("A man in a robe. … I'm putting it in the file") and Edwin answered it there at length ("every parish in the kingdom has one of him"). Repeating case and rebuttal makes her look as though she did not hear him, which costs her the reader for no gain. Keep this delivery, which has the new fact (six fields, one morning) and the fair test; cut the 33 rebuttal down to Edwin's last clause ("that's the only thing about him that isn't ordinary") and let 36 carry the argument.

  3. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Fix: "They might be."

Part 5 — device, not sentence

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Roots trading with the things on roots, worm and grub and mould, ten thousand small lives keeping books with each other in the dark." — the same figure, the same list, the same number, redelivered. A metaphor is a device; it does not survive a second identical outing. Fix: 34 reports the fact plainly and lets 17's figure stand alone — "Loud. Every one of the ten thousand, and all of them at once."

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Cut the clause (see finding 17 for the replacement).

46. "Nothing died here." (35) vs Sorrel's "Nothing died on that road. There was nothing in here to die." (18) — the same distinction, made a second time by a second character. Fix as in 12, which changes it from a restatement into a two-way ambiguity Edwin cannot resolve — that is the new thing.

47. Edwin's fright inventory (36, "most springs when he was starting, and twice since … a winter and a sum") — scene 19 delivered this whole list eighteen scenes ago and better. Compress to the contrast that is actually new: "Both the times since, he had had a noun for it, and the noun was the spring."

Part 6 — weak where it should be strong

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  3. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

The device a second round would be about is Peri's theory speech in 36: it is a paragraph-long recitation with Edwin's paragraph-long rebuttal after it, which is the "recitation that should be conversation" failure, and it is the second time she has argued the priest at him. Break it into four or five exchanges — she gets the middle, he takes the middle; she gets the sharp edge, he has no answer to the sharp edge; she gets the good crop, he takes it back — so the two columns are built in front of the reader rather than announced, and the only thing she says twice is the thing she is losing on.

The other is "write both" as a motif: it is Edwin's instruction in 34, the two-sentence rule in 35, the two columns in 36, and the scene's title. Three statements of one idea is one too many; cut the 35 instance to the plain finding ("No bodies") and let 34's rule pay off in 36's columns.