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:
- .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md (the whole brief — the checklist you apply)
- draft/book-01/VOICE.md
- The scenes before: draft/book-01/scenes/25-walking-point.md, 26-a-ceiling-you-recharge-to.md, 27-the-cellar-at-saltings-corner.md
- The three scenes under review: draft/book-01/scenes/28-fifty-guesses.md, 29-birds-go-around-a-field.md, 30-twelve-miles-of-flat.md
- redacted sentence: unpublished prose the Weave format, Timekeeping, Box formats), notes/canon/world/geography.md (Ranner's Sluice, the pale field, Fenholt), notes/canon/world/silent-soil.md (the pale field section; the "Forbidden" and "Must keep showing" standing rules), notes/canon/world/magic-explained.md, notes/llm-tells.md.
- 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 — e.g. does "eleven thousand tons of rain" belong to Edwin's viewpoint; is "forty miles" right for the tower-to-Fenholt distance; does "a level every few seasons, half the kingdom's worth of roads" parse), then one pass each with Parts 2–7. Report findings only — quote, Part/bullet, one sentence why, replacement or "cut". No praise. Do not edit files. Flag any line overtaken by a 2026-08-30 ruling (shed at nineteen; "six counties"; a lifespan as guarantee; "one spell, one shed"; PENDING). End with two lines on any device a second round of comments would be about.
I'll start by reading the brief and the voice memo.
🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md
✅ 395 lines, 25262 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md
✅ 151 lines, 8887 chars
🔧 Bash: wc -w draft/book-01/scenes/2[5-9]*.md draft/book-01/scenes/30*.md && echo ---- && cat dra…
✅ 197 lines, 20524 chars
🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/28-fifty-guesses.md draft/book-01/scenes/29-birds-go-around-a-fi…
✅ 181 lines, 18294 chars
🔧 Bash: cat notes/canon/characters/edwin.md
✅ 44 lines, 2208 chars
🔧 Read redacted: private
✅ 972 lines, 64776 chars
🔧 Bash: grep -rn "eleven thousand" --include=*.md . | head -30
🔧 Bash: sed -n '1,400p' notes/canon/characters/peri.md
✅ 1 lines, 42 chars
✅ 399 lines, 25628 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '400,600p' notes/canon/characters/peri.md
✅ 200 lines, 12318 chars
🔧 Bash: redacted sentence: unpublished prose
✅ 163 lines, 10038 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n "The Peri direction" -A 40 notes/canon/characters/peri.md; echo ==…
✅ 84 lines, 4794 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '903,960p' notes/canon/characters/peri.md; echo "#####"; sed -n '11…
✅ 105 lines, 5760 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n "^#\|^##" notes/canon/system.md | head -60; echo ====; wc -l notes…
✅ 25 lines, 1028 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '54,233p;483,545p' notes/canon/system.md
✅ 243 lines, 14326 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '647,838p' notes/canon/system.md
✅ 192 lines, 12783 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -rn "ring" draft/book-01/scenes/*.md | grep -iv "bring\|during\|sprin…
✅ 30 lines, 12148 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; head -20 draft/book-01/scenes/22-the-price-of-a-mule.md; echo "###GEO"; gr…
✅ 71 lines, 5152 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '40,135p' notes/canon/world/geography.md
✅ 95 lines, 5947 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n "pale field" -B3 -A25 notes/canon/world/silent-soil.md | head -80;…
✅ 81 lines, 4866 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n "orbidden\|Must keep showing" -A35 notes/canon/world/silent-soil.m…
✅ 1 lines, 31 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -rn "orbidden" notes/canon/world/*.md | head; grep -n "^#" notes/cano…
✅ 9 lines, 465 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '1,12p;560,660p' notes/canon/world/silent-soil.md
✅ 113 lines, 6617 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; ls notes/canon/world/ ; echo ===; grep -rn "Must keep showing" notes/ | he…
✅ 18 lines, 269 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; cat notes/canon/world/magic-explained.md
✅ 301 lines, 16987 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; awk '/^## 3/,/^## 4/' draft/book-01/REMAINDER.md; echo "#####SCENES"; tail…
✅ 151 lines, 12091 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n "^| 2[5-9] \|^| 30 \|^| 31 " draft/book-01/SCENES.md; echo ====; g…
✅ 9 lines, 972 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '1,60p' draft/book-01/SCENES.md; echo "#### act-two binding list";…
✅ 64 lines, 4440 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '63,128p' draft/book-01/SCENES.md
✅ 66 lines, 4074 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; cat notes/llm-tells.md
✅ 332 lines, 19871 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; for f in 28-fifty-guesses 29-birds-go-around-a-field 30-twelve-miles-of-fl…
✅ 3 lines, 118 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n "winch" draft/book-01/scenes/*.md; echo "###ORDISH"; grep -n "Ordi…
✅ 36 lines, 11838 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '967,1110p' notes/canon/system.md
✅ 144 lines, 8604 chars
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, viewpoint knowledge. Edwin cannot know the name. Scene 14: "No signature beyond a farmer at Fenholt"; scene 15 calls her "the woman at Fenholt". The name has to arrive from the alehouse, not before it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, viewpoint knowledge + fact. (a) Tonnage is not a figure this man or this world computes; he thinks in depth over acres. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Scene 29 — "'Did yours say anything? Today, I mean. You taught all day. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, check the clock. The cellar and the water questions were yesterday (scenes 26, 27); only the drill is today. → *"You taught all day. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, count/fact. The four were agreed to be about supper; the first two marked are a dog and a gate. → either drop the supper clause from her ask, or make the marked ones supper-shaped (whether the inn has bacon; whether the eggs are brown).
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, dependent of an earlier claim. Edwin's rule two pages back is "The marking is the exercise", and canon levels a skill on completed practice; the box fires when the fiftieth is written and still unmarked. → make the fiftieth settle before dark (something on the bridge or the last mile) so it is marked, then the box.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, count. She has named one and two; the third has not happened when she says "all three". redacted sentence: unpublished prose → "That was the second part. And there's your lantern, lit before the dark."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, continuity across redacted. In scene 29 she asks at the rise, which is already past the field; she cannot have spent the whole half mile not repeating a question she had not yet asked. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, count. redacted sentence: unpublished prose → "took the half day without argument".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, the sentence says "marked wrong" twice and reads as a duplication. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, count against scene 26, where two of the dozen he could not answer. → "and was using the answers." (Also "since yesterday" / "the day before" in consecutive sentences: cut one.)
Scene 28 — "'You said there's no we.'"
Part 1, reference with no antecedent. redacted sentence: unpublished prose → "You said you're walking to a field and I'm walking with you." This is compounded in scene 30, where he says "We're consulted about soil" — Part 4: he set the terms two days ago and this line takes them back without noticing.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1/Part 6, unnamed manner — "the particular way" names nothing, and the next sentence already gives the actual description. → cut "in the particular way".
Scene 29 — "That was true. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, no flat restatement: the reader cannot say what "the rest of it" is. → say it, or cut the sentence and let his deflection stand alone.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, wrong verb: fields do not stand. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, reference with no antecedent — no horses are in the scene; they walked. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, two flat restatements and the wrong one is delivered: what follows is not a difficult journey but a slow accumulation of directions. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Scene 28 — "'Fen people light lamps early.'"
Part 1/Part 3, viewpoint. redacted sentence: unpublished prose → cut the generalisation, keep the mechanism: *"'Or a woman lighting her lamp early. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, two restatements (the standard set for her / the plan for the day), and the sums are his own commitment, not hers. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Scene 28 — "The willows moved the light about. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
The day did not go quieter; this is fright reported obliquely and hedged with "somewhat". Canon has him state frightening things flat. → "Edwin read the second line again." or cut.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
A figure the reader cannot hold, and a near-idiom (one does not weigh a wrist). → "weighing each word".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Jukebox flourish; "talked out of it" is a near-idiom applied to landscape. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Scene 30 — "as if that settled a question for the day, and did not say which."
The narrator announcing withheld significance without cashing it — the exact family of "an overly oblique line that tries to lend significance it doesn't actually cash out", and the scene's last clause. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose → cut "which was new"; keep whichever of the two observations you want and drop the other.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
The narration footnoting its own callback, and an unnamed voice besides. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Announcing an effect before delivering it (llm-tells 14). The paragraph after the box says this at length and better. → cut the trailing clause.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted"
False precision as gravitas (llm-tells 12), and the second is a personal count of his own achievement in his own head. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
The first explains what the reader can already see; the second is a wordy abstraction. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Onions are strung after curing, not off a field still drying. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose → "The first one's what he'd tell a stranger. I want the other one too."
Scene 28 — "'Not for help,' she added. 'You said there's no we. I'm reporting the wording. That's different.'"
redacted sentence: unpublished prose → "'Not for help. I want it said out loud before I ask it.'"
Scene 30 — "half the kingdom's worth of roads" and "He had taught more people since then than lived in most kingdoms"
VOICE.md §2: he never thinks his own praise unbidden — the count of lives arrives only when somebody else raises it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Both are in his own head here. redacted sentence: unpublished prose For getting to Fenholt." is the joke and it does not need the setup.
(Also, as the prompt asked: "a level every few seasons, half the kingdom's worth of roads" does not parse cleanly — a rate and an extent in the same appositive list with no connective.)
redacted sentence: unpublished prose "Every mage who ever" is also a fact overstated into a claim he cannot have.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose His cheapest passport is missing from the stretch; give one answer the framing correction that then answers.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The onions ride off on his pack and are never seen again, and her own fiftieth guess is what cancels the lesson. Either the lesson happens on the page (it is the promised beat, and the promise is Edwin's), or scene 29 sets it for the following night and scene 30 says so. As written the scene raises a thread and drops it inside 400 words.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Cut the narration line.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Repeated staging, scenes 27 and 30. Identical device: an inn, an hour of being nobody, one man carrying the news, the room turning to look. Vary the second — let him be recognised at the door, or not at all, and have the drover's news reach him by the landlord.
House-word convergence across the three scenes. "in a firm hand" (28, 29); "the notebook against her forearm" (26, 29); "going about their/its business" of soil (26, 29); "the state of the fen drains" verbatim (29, 30); "she turned in place, a complete rotation" / "She turned right round" (29, 30); a pump groaning in the middle distance (28, 29). Vary or cut one of each pair.
Shed at nineteen, college unnamed in the shed line: correct in scene 30. No "six counties", no "one spell, one shed", no PENDING, no lifespan-as-guarantee: clean. Box formats, the Weave's three-part image answer, the [Fate Magic] 2 on Day 8 and [Wayfaring] 12 on arrival, the forty miles (15 + 13 + 12) and "twelve miles of flat": all check against canon. The one ruling breach is "half the kingdom" moved out of the village's mouth into Edwin's own narration, above.
Devices a second round would be about. The cooking lesson: it is currently a promise the next scene spends without paying, and shuffling the words in scene 30 will not fix it — either stage the pan in Ranner's Sluice or move the lesson to Fenholt and let scene 29 say so.
And Peri's Weave reading: the scene wants her three-part exegesis to be both wrong and impressive, but she claims "all three, in order" with the third still in front of her and a lit lantern in plain sight — make her see it and be right about the fact while still wrong about the meaning, or the device reads as the author holding her hand.