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in full, and follow every part) on two freshly drafted scenes: draft/book-01/scenes/97-first-known-first-looked-at.md unpublished and 98-nine-sentences.md unpublished. Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md in full first, then draft/book-01/SCENES.md's act-three binding list (end of file), notes/canon/characters/ for redacted, Peri, Edwin, minor.md (Lord Marsh, the secretary, redacted), and scenes 94–96 for immediate context. Warnings to police: the 'writing it down' motif (97 is a sheet-making scene and ends on redacted writing her no and Edwin watching 'the fourth time in a month he had watched a person write against what they had wanted to be true, and two of the four had been him' — flag the count-and-verdict button and propose; 98 ends on Peri's 'As a thing about the obvious' — button?); 'because' density; redacted's register (her redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose the three readings 'The first time... The second time... The third time' — template? rule); viewpoint (98: Edwin sees the Weave answer 'come, in the corner of her eye' — he cannot see her status; propose); sense; clocks; whether Peri's 'Not as a thing about the Weave. As a thing about the obvious' is hers (no balanced antithesis) or a composed tag; whether the Weave's three lines are rendered per the book's box convention (italic bracketed, one per line). STRICT: never read chapters/, rewrite/, draft/book-01/rejected-act2/, summaries/, or plans/book-01/arc-0*.md, unpublished or their git history.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🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/97-first-known-first-looked-at.md unpublished && echo "=====98…
✅ 75 lines, 12876 chars
🔧 Bash: tail -120 draft/book-01/SCENES.md
✅ 120 lines, 11329 chars
Noted already: "nought" is banned. Now the canon and prior scenes.
🔧 Bash: ls notes/canon/characters/ && wc -l notes/canon/characters/*.md
✅ 19 lines, 496 chars — appearance.md / redacted.md / edwin.md
🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/94-*.md draft/book-01/scenes/95-*.md draft/book-01/scenes/96-*.md
✅ 115 lines, 19292 chars
🔧 Bash: cat notes/canon/characters/redacted.md
✅ 41 lines, 2181 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '1,200p' redacted: private
✅ 200 lines, 12154 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '200,400p' redacted: private
✅ 201 lines, 12608 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '400,520p' redacted: private
🔧 Bash: grep -n -i -A20 "Marsh" notes/canon/characters/minor.md | head -120
✅ 121 lines, 7805 chars
✅ 87 lines, 5053 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
✅ 1 lines, 31 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -rn "^\*\[" draft/book-01/scenes/*.md | head -30; echo ---; grep -rn…
✅ 7 lines, 551 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -i "weave" notes/canon/characters/peri.md | head -60
✅ 23 lines, 2777 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '320,345p;975,1000p;1180,1215p' notes/canon/characters/peri.md
✅ 88 lines, 6092 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -i "private\|only the person\|nobody else can see\|others cannot\|…
✅ 3 lines, 226 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '1090,1125p' notes/canon/system.md
✅ 36 lines, 1984 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; for f in 97-first-known-first-looked-at.md unpublished…
✅ 17 lines, 3105 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; grep -n "—" 97-first-known-first-looked-at.md unpublished…
✅ 16 lines, 1581 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
✅ 20 lines, 2041 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '255,300p' notes/canon/world/silent-soil.md
✅ 46 lines, 2455 chars
Here are the findings. Nothing was edited.
1. Part 1 (count inside the scene, opening line). "The sheet had two columns and it took two days." The next paragraph gives it three: "Then the two columns. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Three clauses that cannot all be true: on the ninth (one day), in three afternoons, made to fit into one and a half. And the scene has her walking to redacted on the tenth, so there is no third afternoon anywhere.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Name her against the house: "read to redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
5. Part 1 (antecedent) / Part 5 (callback carrying meaning). "The book says four miles" — no book has been named in this scene, and "the four-mile test" is redacted's trade language from act two. Per VOICE.md, an exchange must be understandable to a reader who has not read the previous scene.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose And "put my face in it" reads as putting her face in the chain. The trailing clause has no flat restatement — said what to whom?
→ "It's a clean mouth. redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose I'd have written that down for anybody who asked me."
Part 4 / redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Her form is the pile that runs out, ending on the reason.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 4 / redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose A fact already delivered is not delivered again in a different mouth. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose As a thing about the obvious"). Keep this one, which does real work, and retire the other two (findings 20, 22).
11. Part 1 (vague specific). "I've tried it four ways." Four ways of trying a map of four crosses is not something a reader can restate. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
12. Part 6 / Part 1 (weak, and a false picture). "the fourth mile of the redacted, which he was sitting on" — he is at a table in the works hut. Either "the fourth mile of the redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose It is also the third scene running (96, 97, 98) to end on somebody writing, against SCENES.md's "no scene ends on writing more than one in three."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
15. VOICE.md (a binding word, seven times). "nought" — "It actually was bugging me as a word", ruled out 2026-08-31; the drafting convention is "day zero". Six instances in 97 ("its own nought", "the nought is", "Fenholt's nought", "The pale field's nought", "The redacted's nought") and one in 98 ("in days from four noughts").
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
17. Part 1 (continuity against canon — the scene's payoff is pre-spent). "You've just written to them to have the registers ready in days. You wrote it before I asked." Per silent-soil.md (chs. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Peri has copied that correspondence. So her "you wrote it before I asked" is not a coincidence to marvel at; the request predates the Weave answer by weeks and she knows it.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Before any of this. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
19. Part 1 (a word doing a job it cannot do) + box convention. "turn the notebook and write, in the System's own flat hand, three lines". The System has no hand; she is writing in her own hand, in the System's words. And rendering her transcription in the book's box format (*[…]*, which elsewhere means a box the reader is seeing over a character's shoulder) conflates the copy with the box.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
20. Part 5 (the device, and the scene's real risk) — canon. The three lines do the deduction for her: "*[You are counting places. redacted sentence: unpublished prose The ch. 013 exemplar is the standard: the three lines were flat observations, and Edwin then showed that line three was true of every acre in the fen. Here nobody discounts anything; the Weave hands over the answer, in an imperative, and it is a site's evidence. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
→ Under-specify it and make Peri do the work: [redacted, and redacted.] / [You are standing on the youngest of them.] / [Somebody was counting wheat.] — she then gets to "it's a calendar, not a map" and "registers" herself, which is the scene she is supposed to have.
22. Part 2 (button) — and the scene's closing device. "Not as a thing about the Weave. As a thing about the obvious." A balanced antithetical tag closing the scene like a bow, and a callback that closes on Edwin's word from four lines earlier. It is also Edwin's construction (the definitional second half) in Peri's mouth. Per VOICE.md the scene may end on a verdict; it may not end on an epigram.
→ "'Yes,' said Peri. redacted sentence: unpublished prose I'm putting that in the middle column, and I'm not putting it under the Weave.'"
23. Part 1 (clarity) — Marsh's speech. "and I did not know that until this morning, and I have been a lord for twenty-two years." A button on an otherwise good speech, and it is the third time the twenty-two years has been counted at Edwin (94 twice). redacted sentence: unpublished prose
24. Part 4 (Marsh's register). "You have disappointed me... redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
25. Part 5 (recitation). The nine sentences are given as one 230-word semicolon chain summarising a document, in a book that elsewhere quotes documents straight (redacted' ledger entry in 95, redacted's nobody knows, E. Moss in 96). It reads as a device rather than as a page. Either quote the page as nine numbered lines — this is the more literate-world choice and it is what Marsh puts his hand flat on — or cut to four of the nine and let Marsh's reading supply the rest. As written it will draw a comment.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Also check against peri.md's "stopped asking daily" discipline: "she had asked it every day since Cornmonth" may need "most days since Cornmonth".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Two facts about a name with no reason on the page for the reader to hold both. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
29. because density (SCENES.md: "because rationed"). Seven in 97, seven in 98, ~1,200 words each. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
The device a second round of comments would be about. Watching somebody write, and not saying anything. It closes 96 (redacted underlines the name, "which Edwin saw and let stand"), it appears twice in 97 ("he looked at it and left it"; the closing paragraph), and again in 98 ("which Edwin saw and understood"; Peri turning the notebook so he can read it). Four scenes, six instances, always the same beat: a person writes, Edwin observes it and withholds comment, and the narration reports his withholding as significance. To make it work, it needs to be one scene's move rather than the act's default — keep it at the redacted moment in 97, where the writing costs her something, and in 96 and 98 have Edwin answer what he reads instead of noting that he did not.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The three readings earn their template because each reading changes the page; the surrounding counts do not all earn theirs, and finding 14's closer is the one that reads as arithmetic standing in for a feeling. Cut the counts that do not produce a decision and the template stops looking like one.