2026-09-02
User:
Run the pre-David pass exactly as specified in redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished, 87-nothing-to-write.md unpublished, 88-ask-me-in-a-month.md unpublished, 89-the-road-south-east.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md in full first, then notes/canon/characters/ for redacted, Peri, Edwin, Mattie Ordish, minor.md (redacted and the boy, Burl, Sennet, redacted, Ferrin), and scenes 28, 30, 51, 63, 81, 85 for immediate context. Warnings to police: the 'writing it down' motif (count per scene; cut where it is a period; endings: 86 ends on Mattie's 'Write that', 87 on 'you've both been right', 88 on Peri's middle-column entry, 89 on redacted not yet saying the air — rule on each; at most one of the four may end on writing); redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose A list.' and 87 has 'Nothing to write is a reading' and 88 has 'a thing that's never wrong isn't an instrument. It's a fact I haven't understood yet' (Peri's) — rule on each); Mattie's voice (short declaratives, no subordination; 'It's not dead. redacted sentence: unpublished prose 89 opens on Ferrin at the gate — fine?); buttons; dialect (first-person "I'll not" retired: 88 has 'I'll not touch one of them'); em dashes in the body (none allowed); negative parallelism; counted templates (86's four causes are canon and a list — fine — but check 'One. Two. Three. Four.' delivery); viewpoint; sense (86: chain arithmetic 19 links = 12.5 ft: a link is 7.92 inches, so 19 links = 12.54 ft: fine; 7 ch 54 unpublished minus 7 ch 21 = 33 links = 'a chain and a third short'? redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted, Sennet, redacted, redacted, the shawl woman) is a list or a device; whether Peri's chain-ends question at the end is engine or filler; whether the final sentence is a cut or a cadence. STRICT: never read chapters/, rewrite/, draft/book-01/rejected-act2/, summaries/, or plans/book-01/arc-0*.md, unpublished or their git history.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.
🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md
🔧 Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md
✅ 257 lines, 16258 chars
✅ 426 lines, 27364 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished 87-nothing-to-write.md unpublished…
✅ 184 lines, 25075 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && ls && wc -l redacted.md peri.md edwin.md minor.…
✅ 23 lines, 279 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/notes/canon/characters && cat redacted.md mattie-ordish.md
✅ 41 lines, 2181 chars
🔧 Bash: cat "redacted: private"
✅ 41 lines, 2181 chars
🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/redacted.md
✅ 543 lines, 35998 chars
🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/mattie-ordish.md
✅ 480 lines, 29431 chars
🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/edwin.md
✅ 973 lines, 64921 chars
🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/peri.md
✅ 975 lines, 64406 chars
🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/peri.md
✅ 356 lines, 22294 chars
🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/minor.md
✅ 628 lines, 40049 chars
🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/ferrin.md
✅ 362 lines, 22167 chars
Now the context scenes.
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && ls | sed -n '25,95p'
✅ 65 lines, 1722 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/85-do-not-delay-again.md unpublished
✅ 32 lines, 5191 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished
✅ 114 lines, 13463 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished 81-what-specifically-goe…
✅ 135 lines, 18576 chars
I read the skill in full, VOICE.md, the canon files for redacted, Peri, Edwin, Mattie, minor.md and Ferrin, and scenes 28, 30, 51, 63, 81, 85. Findings below; nothing was edited.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished has them still at the Ordish gate on the morning of the fourth, nine miles from the fen edge and a good deal further from redacted. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Fix belongs in 85: the letter should promise the road on the fourth and the works on a later named day (the eighth or ninth), not the reverse.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Count error of exactly the kind he flags. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished minus 7 ch 21 is 33 links, which is a third of a chain, not a chain and a third. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
4. [88] "The knot's done nothing. Thirty-four days." — the knot count runs from the binding, not from the drill: scene 51 unpublished has "Nothing. Sixteen days" on 30 Cornmonth, so 30 Harvestmonth is forty-six. Peri also keeps the count ("I've been counting too") and would not have it wrong. Replacement: *"And the knot's done nothing. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
5. [88] "It's been a month and four days." vs "On the road, on the twenty-fourth of Cornmonth, you got a box." — the scene's own two dates disagree: 24 Cornmonth to 30 Harvestmonth is thirty-six days. And the drill conversation (scene 28) is earlier still, on the road east from Saltings Corner, around the 22nd — thirty-eight days. Pick one and make the columns match it ("thirty-four days" in the notebook has the same problem).
6. [88] "On the road, on the twenty-fourth of Cornmonth, you got a box. Wayfaring. Level twelve." — [Wayfaring 12] lands in the middle of Fenholt's street, not on the road (scene 30), and Fenholt was reached about the 22nd. redacted sentence: unpublished prose If the promise is not on the page in a later scene, it has to be planted, or Peri is citing a line the reader has never heard.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished sets Edwin's missile drill at thirty a day, from that morning, and redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose A weekly fifty is the drill she specifically refused. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
9. [89] "she had opened the hand fifty times in the first hour afterwards with her eyes on the clock" — nobody in this world reads a clock (system.md: the hour is called up from status). Replacement: "and had counted them out, fifty in the first hour."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replacement: cut "and nothing in her head".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Burl has staked his chain-ends for weeks; Mattie read her own line with Burl on the far end four days ago; redacted held a chain end for him. What is new is that he cannot hold anything himself. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose "Both lines" is actively misleading. Replacement: "both runs".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replacement: "where Sennet had driven them."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose It is still the accounts book (Peri copies the protocol into it "under the boy's four pages"), so nothing stopped a week ago. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
15. [87] "The stakes have not moved since the eleventh." — either they moved before the eleventh, which is the most important fact in the scene and nobody remarks on it, or the boy means "since I began". redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
[87] "because Edwin could not walk fourteen miles with the arm and redacted had said so" — a broken forearm does not stop a man walking, and redacted's rule is about carrying, banks and hills. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
18. [89] "which took two people and a great deal of patience, one of them Peri's" — "one of them" reaches back past "patience" to "two people" and misses. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
19. [89] "Peri's stitches had come out on the second, at the same table, by the same setter" — canon has them out on 4 Fallowmonth, at the Blackrow, by redacted, and that scene is the one that spends redacted's needle and her own scar on Peri. If the third draft is moving it, the move needs ruling; as it stands it quietly retires a planned beat.
20. [89] "a line through a name on the roll" — which name? The board carries several strikings (Vosse, Coule's brother, the four of the fourteenth). As written it gestures. Either name it or cut it.
21. [89] "a woman in a shawl Edwin did not know" — the woman with the shawl is an established Fenholt figure who has twice gone to Peri rather than to him; "Edwin did not know" reads as a contradiction. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
[89] "a place called the redacted that redacted had named twice and described once" — the redacted is Marsh's new main drain, and it reaches them through Marsh's letters and his engineers, not through a delver. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
[89] "redacted was at his gate with his arm in a sling that matched Edwin's"** — a new injury to a 71-year-old, invented in a clause, unexplained, and reading as a visual joke. Either give it a cause a sentence earlier or cut the sling.
**24. [88] "nobody said anything about it that was worth writing" — the "nothing happened" fault; a whole afternoon of work happened. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
25. [88] "because it was the first question she had asked him in a month that he had never been asked" — two readings and I cannot choose (first in a month / first ever). redacted sentence: unpublished prose
27. [89] "in about the words a man uses to tell somebody the ladder's next" — a figure the reader cannot hold (it is a callback to the church tower), and it compares a blessing to nothing visible. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
29. [89] "He did that for the road, not for us." — as staged, Ferrin blesses "over" them, so Peri's inference has nothing on the page to stand on; and the construction is a negative-parallelism verdict, which is Edwin's shape and banned for her. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
30. [88] "That's the whole of my method" and "That's the whole drill." (twice) — "the whole of it" is in the named banned family ("continues to be a weird recurring phrase that you should avoid"), and the scene runs three of them. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
32. [88] "and I'll not touch one of them" — retired construction, first person, ruled "particularly weird". redacted sentence: unpublished prose
34. [88] "That's the whole drill." / "That's the whole drill. I've done it." — Edwin's definitional "That's X" handed back to him in his own frame; peri.md says she does not mirror his sentence frame. Replacement: "I've done it. I'm going on doing it."
35. [89] "'I'd a speech about you that I carried round for a month,' she had said, in the street, 'and it was wrong. An empty space is better than the next wrong thing in it.'" — two faults. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replacement: cut the speech line entirely — the book entry does the work — and if a line is wanted, "I'd rather have it empty than have the wrong thing in it."
37. [89] "'Twenty-fourth for the chains. Seventeenth for the stakes'" — two dates in one Mattie utterance; her rule is at most one date in her dialogue in a whole scene. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose In Peri's mouth it is miscast twice. Replacement: question marks on both.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose "A list. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
40. [86] "because a man who has just been caught out by his own handwriting checks his arithmetic" — a narrator aphorism in a scene that already spends Edwin's, and it is the same construction, in the same clause position, as scene 85 unpublished's "because a man who has been caught out by his own handwriting has no business being particular about his next." Twice in three scenes makes it the drafter's frame rather than the narrator's habit. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
41. [86] "One. The planting slows it." — Burl has just said "The planting" and is standing at the far end; the list takes his contribution back into Edwin's mouth unattributed. Also, the four items run from four words to sixty, so the numbering reads as a template imposed on uneven material. Ruling: the four causes are canon and the list is right; the delivery wants one repair — "One. Burl's. The planting slows it." — and item three trimmed by half.
42. [86, ending] "She wiped the fork. 'Write that.'" — a bare imperative (two per scene, each carrying a name, count, tool or ground), Edwin's write-it-as frame in Mattie's mouth, the third writing-imperative in the scene, and the scene's ending on the record. Ruling: 86 does not get the writing ending. Replacement: end on the act — *"'Three weeks and a day. Same as the barley. It's not dead. redacted sentence: unpublished prose It's not doing anything." is hers, not negative parallelism: two flat instances, no second limb, no claim about life.)
43. [87, ending] "The money was your grandfather's decision and the writing's yours, and you've both been right." — a balanced two-half closer, and the most portable sentence in the speech, at the scene's peak, which edwin.md 4 names as a defect however good the line. The content answers the boy's question and must stay. Replacement: *"It's worth the money now. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
[87] "Nothing to write is a reading. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Ruling: keep the second, which teaches and is concrete; cut "It's the reading I'd pay most for, because it's the one nobody bothers to take."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Worth a ruling: if Sorrel is now the one keeping it, that is a change, not a detail.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Each is a fact, not a line to reuse. Run tools/overlap_check.py on all four scenes before these go to him.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose It has stopped being what these people do and become the period at the end of every paragraph — and where it is a period, it is standing in for the beat that should be there. To make it work: it stays wherever a decision is being fixed in ink (Edwin's list, the boy's four pages, Peri's empty space filled), and comes out wherever it is only punctuation — which is 86's ending, 88's gloss, and two of 89's five.
The second, smaller: Peri's "I had it wrong and I'd rather say it than leave it sitting" is performed three times across 88 and 89 — the pump speech, the fill-in question preamble, and the street line before the book goes to redacted. It was excellent once. To make it work, spend it once, in 88 where it is paid for by the month of columns, and let 89 carry only the entry with no speech attached to it.