2026-08-30
User:
You are running the pre-David pass on five newly drafted scenes of the third draft of Book 1 of Autoroad. redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished
,71-in-the-hill.md unpublished,72-not-in-the-line.md unpublished,73-thirteen-down.md unpublished. For context also read scenes 59–68 in the same directory (do not review those). Consultnotes/canon/characters/redacted.md (Voice — binding: check every redacted line against her sentence shapes, anchors, the retired doubled-insistence form, and the constructions banned for her — bare imperatives without a name or count, "Then [X]" derivations, verdict tails, balanced two-half sentences),notes/canon/characters/minor.md(redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Do not read or cite anything undernotes/sealed/.Report every finding as: file, the exact sentence quoted, the problem in one line, and a concrete replacement wording where one is needed. Apply the "does this sentence make sense" lens (shape filled but fact unchecked) as a separate sweep after the voice sweep — count every count, check every date and every back-reference against the earlier third-draft scenes. Number the findings. No preamble, no praise.
I'll start by reading the skill and voice references.
🔧 Bash: redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
✅ 85 lines, 2344 chars — 394 .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md / 150 draft/book-01/VOICE.md / 579 notes/voices.md
🔧 Bash: cat .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md
✅ 394 lines, 23789 chars
🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/VOICE.md && echo "=====VOICES=====" && cat notes/voices.md
✅ 41 lines, 2240 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md
✅ 151 lines, 8887 chars
🔧 Bash: cat notes/voices.md | sed -n '1,300p'
✅ 300 lines, 17690 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '300,579p' redacted/notes/voices.md
✅ 280 lines, 16410 chars
🔧 Bash: cat redacted/notes/llm-tells.md
✅ 332 lines, 19871 chars
Now the scenes under review.
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && for f in 69-under-barrows-barn.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose…
✅ 17 lines, 2190 chars
🔧 Read redacted: private
✅ 283 lines, 31844 chars
Now the context scenes 59–68.
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && cat 59-the-slate-at-the-chain.md unpublished 60-i…
✅ 50 lines, 5869 chars
🔧 Read /tmp/claude-501/-Users-drmaciver-Projects-autoroad/3ef92e14-71be-4557-a7d1-f251a7410081/scratchpad/a.txt
✅ 306 lines, 28367 chars
🔧 Read /tmp/claude-501/-Users-drmaciver-Projects-autoroad/3ef92e14-71be-4557-a7d1-f251a7410081/scratchpad/b.txt
✅ 334 lines, 36245 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '1,200p' notes/canon/characters/redacted.md
✅ 200 lines, 12154 chars
🔧 Bash: grep -n -A 200 "^## Voice" notes/canon/characters/redacted.md | sed -n '1,220p'
✅ 201 lines, 13351 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '449,544p' notes/canon/characters/redacted.md
✅ 96 lines, 6458 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && echo "--STAKES--"; grep -n "stake" *.md; echo "--TE…
✅ 73 lines, 23301 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished; echo "==PERI LEVEL==";…
✅ 37 lines, 4001 chars
🔧 Bash: grep -n -i "redacted\|redacted\|tess\|redacted\|puckett" notes/canon/characters/min…
✅ 30 lines, 2245 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '205,300p' notes/canon/characters/minor.md; echo "=== redacted RULES ==="; sed -…
✅ 165 lines, 10041 chars
🔧 Bash: grep -n -A 60 "^## Voice — binding" notes/canon/characters/peri.md | sed -n '1,90p'
✅ 61 lines, 3927 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '470,620p' notes/canon/characters/peri.md
✅ 151 lines, 9504 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && for f in 69*.md 70*.md 71*.md 72*.md 73*.md; do w=$…
✅ 5 lines, 341 chars — 69-under-barrows-barn.md unpublished words= 1326 emdash= 1 and= 80 / redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished words= 1342 emdash= 1 and= 98 / 71-in-the-hill.md unpublished words= 1235 emdash= 1 and= 70
Grouped by scene; within each scene the Part 1 (sense/fact/count) findings come first, then Parts 2–7. Word counts and em-dash budgets are within limits; " and " runs at 60–73 per 1,000 words across all five scenes, which is Finding 44.
1. "Numbers, in the day book, in redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted stood over him" — Part 1, dependents-of-an-edit / Part 4. Scene 61 unpublished gave redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted petty. Replace: "…in redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The protocol is eleven stakes (nine in the barley, L and M in Sennet's grass; scenes 40, 44, 45, 55 all say eleven, and 45's is the lodged wording: "eleven stakes to read"). Replace both with "eleven" and "eleven lines".
3. *"redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose In this draft nothing was flooded on the night; Edwin spent everything on the mist working and told redacted "I cannot do anything to it" (66). "Put there" is a second-draft legacy. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
4. "'Whose spades?' and he said nine" — Part 1, a reply that does not answer. She asks whose; he answers a count. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
5. "He put it to redacted at nine … and he said nine" — Part 1, two different nines in one sentence. Move the clock: "He put it to redacted at half past eight."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The one dry way out is stated to be the deepest corner. Either the way out is the west end (and the lamps go there), or Edwin's line becomes "leave it one way out and a lamp on it" and 70's depths swap ends. This has to be settled before the north-east paragraph (Finding 8) can mean anything.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted"* — Part 1, repeated number reads as a slip. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted."
8. "She had looked at the fall of the yard once, and at the corner, and set the lamps, and it was the right corner, and neither of them said so." — Part 2, the gesture at meaning. The paragraph claims a shared piece of expertise and never says what it is; as written the reader cannot reconstruct why north-east is right (and Finding 6 says it isn't). Either give the reason in redacted's own terms one line earlier, or cut the whole paragraph.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose "The way out" has just meant the redacted' exit gap; here "cut" makes it read as the drainage trench. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
12. *"The fortnight redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Nothing in the scene or the four after it says why the fortnight collapsed to six days. Either name it in the same sentence ("…was six days long, because on the sixth day redacted's six arrived and redacted came forward") or cut "in the end".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose In 56 the same beat reads "'Six,' she said. 'Agent of Fate. Six.'" Here the bare "Seven." has no class name and no verb. Replace: "Agent of Fate, seven."
14. "with a lamp in her hand and mud on her knees" — Part 1, contradicts the established drill. redacted's whole doctrine, drilled on the page in 64 and repeated at the head of this scene, is that a lamp goes on the ground, never in the hand. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Edwin measures in yards, feet and chains; men-lengths is a coinage. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
16. *"The redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted.md 7a shape in the narration and a Part 2 gesture. Replace: "They had failed at the redacted farm barn on the sixteenth. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose He meant it. She thought he was being kind."* — Part 6, the three-beat is tidier than the beat is worth, and "best page in the book" is asserted. Cut "He meant it." and let the last sentence stand.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
18. "'Nineteen and fourteen,' she said. 'In ten days.'" — Part 1, fact. The nineteen was a whole month (Cornmonth); only the fourteen was in ten days (61, and redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose As written redacted states the counts wrong in her first line. Replace: "'Nineteen in Cornmonth,' she said. 'Fourteen in ten days of this one.'"
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The letter went on the tenth; redacted budgeted "four to redacted and back," i.e. two days out, so it reached them about the twelfth. They arrived on the nineteenth having walked forty miles. "The day after we had it" cannot be reconciled. Either give the letter a delay redacted names ("It sat four days at Ranner's Sluice with a rider who'd broken a leg. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Scene 61 unpublished: "Fellowship's fifty miles south-east"; scene 84 unpublished says the same. Replace "sixty" with "fifty".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's hands"* — Part 1, self-contradiction. redacted's hands arrived at four that afternoon; the same evening is not a day behind. Cut "a day behind redacted's hands,".
22. "and nobody but Edwin and Peri knew why" — Part 1 / Part 2, and contradicted on the page. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Cut the clause; the correction stands on its own.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Scene 69 unpublished set the line at "eight people behind the lamps". Make it eight, or raise 69's number.
26. "because the floor was not level either" — Part 1, wrong noun. What sets the depth of water in a crawl space is the ground under the barn, not the barn's floor above it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
28. *"redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Cut to: "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Nobody remarked on it."* — Part 1, antecedent: the date of what? Replace: "…and the date of redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Cut the line; let redacted's reply attach to redacted's instruction to redacted.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose minor.md: redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose The argument-aimed-at-an-imagined-future-reader is Edwin's construction by name (redacted.md 7b). Replace with something she has seen: "'Write down that it worked. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Cut the whole clause chain after "Four lines," and end the scene on the entry itself.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Cut everything after the colon.
34. "'They're eleven,' she said. / 'Ten. redacted's arm.'" — Part 1, the reply corrects a count that was not made. Peri's eleven is redacted + four Charter + six redacted, which already excludes redacted; Edwin's "Ten" then evaporates when he says "Eleven's over her ten." Cut Edwin's line and let him open on "Eleven's over her ten."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Scene 62 unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose Change to "for the fifth time".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Scene 68 unpublished has her at four written. Replace with "four times" and "any of them" for "either of them".
37. "because the place it was wrong was the place he was going to go down the hill anyway" — Part 1, no flat restatement survives. "The place" cannot do this job. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
38. "'That's an address, not a reason.'" — Part 1 (wrong word: an address is a location or a form of words, neither of which is what she means) and negative parallelism inside quotation marks. Replace: "'You've said they're yours. That's not what they are.'"
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Which book, and would it exist? redacted's own figure is ten and she has never cited a twelve. Either name the book and where Peri read it, or cut the sentence and let "They've got eleven" run off redacted's ten.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose She has just said four on the margin is what you want and four is what exists; "there isn't a fifth" then reads as a complaint about a shortfall that is not one. Cut the clause.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Say that.'"
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Sennet put two hundred and ninety on the green (65); the two hundred were in the pightle. And the night was the thirteenth, so this morning of the twentieth is seven days. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Eleven hands less two is nine. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
44. (whole-scene, and the largest finding in the batch.) Peri's dialogue breaks her two countable binding rules in the scene where she is under the most pressure in the book so far. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose The result is nineteen-of-twenty Edwin: piles, derived rules, balanced closers. The fix is not trimming; rebuild her four speeches as short unsubordinated units with the conclusion last, counting where a pile is wanted ("That's eleven. redacted's one. Four of the Charter's. Six from redacted, and redacted counts."), and put two genuine mid-sentence breaks restarted flatter into the "I did think that" speech.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted.md 6b, the retired round-1 form of the doubled insistence: the pair inside one short speech as emphasis. Replace with a single "You're never in the line."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted.'"* (70) — redacted.md, round 3: the "Then [X]" derivation is Edwin's and she loses the line when she takes it. Two in one scene. Replace: "I go first. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted."
47. "'You're small, and you've a point and not an edge…'" — negative parallelism inside quotation marks (voices.md dialogue rule 3). redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted. / 'You are.'"* — voices.md dialogue rule 5, the reflexive echo, twice in three lines. Cut Edwin's "You are." and let her "I'm one short" close it.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
52. "eleven against a wanted twelve" — Part 5, asserted. The twelve is Peri's unattributed book (Finding 39) and the narration now takes it as fact. Either fix 39 or make this "eleven against redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The hill argument dates from the causeway on the tenth; this is the nineteenth. Replace "for a fortnight" with "since the causeway".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished outright. 73 says redacted put Peri twelfth on the twentieth, which is this day. As written the sheet has eleven names, then twelve lines, and Peri is on it and not on it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted writing the twelfth name.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Thirteen people plus four over is seventeen. Either "Sixteen lamps for thirteen people. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's answer drops one item), or "Seventeen lamps".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose She means the opposite direction. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted.md 7b). redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
59. "'Every one of them, not one.'" — Part 1, parses two ways on first read. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
60. "and she was talking to Edwin about the ninth lamp while she did it." followed immediately by her talking about the ninth lamp — llm-tells 14, announcing the effect before delivering it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
62. The strap sentence runs ninety words on nine "and"s — voices.md pattern 7, polysyndeton stacking judgements rather than acts. Break it at "waxed thread."
63. "the way he looked at sixteen spits" — Part 2, the matched number is a jukebox coin (there is no reason for sixteen spits), and spit is a specialist term with no note and no glossary entry. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
64. "and thought that the sheet said a good deal less than everyone in the room knew, and that this was what a sheet was for." — Part 2, the narrator aphorism, and the scene's one allowed aphorism is better spent elsewhere. Cut from "and thought" to the end of the sentence.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose This is word-for-word redacted's line about the candle in scene 59 unpublished, and the inherited-practice-nobody-understands beat now runs three times in fifteen scenes (the candle, the bottom's close, and redacted's box in 73). redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
67. "and redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's book" — Part 5, redundancy. The names-and-years entry has now happened twice. Cut it here.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's line and voices.md already cites it as an example of a maxim to be rewritten as an instruction. Third outing in six scenes. Cut the clause and let "with the doors open" carry it.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Eat first.'"* — redacted.md 6c revised: the bare imperative belongs to nobody. Replace: "Eat before you come."
70. "'Air's out,' he said … 'Same as the fourteenth.'" — Part 1, viewpoint knowledge. Edwin has read the mouth air exactly once, on the tenth (59). On the fourteenth he was in the village with nothing left. Replace: "Same as the tenth, and harder."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose The rising sun is ahead of them and to the right, not behind. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
72. "Peri, two ahead of redacted" — Part 1, count against the order given six paragraphs earlier. redacted 1, two redacted 2–3, the Charter's four 4–7, Peri 8, three redacted 9–11, Edwin 12, redacted 13. redacted is "three ahead of" Edwin, i.e. 9. Peri is one ahead of redacted, not two.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Scene 60 unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replace "At the second cut" with "A quarter of a mile short of the rise". (The eleven days is correct.)
redacted sentence: unpublished prose It is also wrong for Peri, whose engine is books. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
75. "There was no reason in it. It was where the questions were." — Part 1, self-contradiction: the second sentence is a reason. Cut "There was no reason in it."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replace: "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
77. "redacted said, 'Walk on'" — third "Walk on" in nine paragraphs, and a bare imperative. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted. 'On.'"
78. "'and you'll find it says it on the way out too, with more on it'" — Part 1, "with more on it" is doing no work the reader can hold. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
79. *"redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Peri did not ask; she declined to count herself. Replace: "redacted had said, when redacted asked her about the letter."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replace: "and she went last all day."
81. "and did not know what column she had put it in" — Part 1, "column" as a fact about her notebook is asserted here for the first time in the batch and the sentence turns on it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted."
82. The polysyndetic report is the batch's default engine, not a choice. 60–73 " and " per 1,000 words across all five scenes, against voices.md pattern 7, which permits "and" chains for sequences of physical acts and forbids them for stacked evaluations. Scene 69 unpublished's paragraph 9 and scene 72 unpublished's strap sentence are the worst cases, but the habit is uniform, and it is why every character in these scenes — redacted, redacted, Peri, redacted — has ended up speaking with the same lungs. Making it work: give each scene two or three genuine "and" runs on physical sequence and break every other one at the first evaluation. Removing it is not an option; it is currently what the prose sounds like.
83. The inherited-practice-nobody-understands device has fired three times in five scenes — redacted's candle (59, re-quoted in 72), "the bottom's close" (72), and redacted's box-at-the-mouth (73), all with the same construction ("nobody's ever known what it's for") and, in 72's case, the same sentence redacted used in 59. It is a good device and it is now the batch's signature. Either cut one of the three outright (redacted's, which does the least, and whose content — the box says the name and nothing else — is already carried by Edwin's own box a paragraph earlier), or make one of them a practice somebody can explain, so the pattern is not the point.