# Positive Prose Audit - Chapter 09

Target: `output/chapters/chapter_09.md`
Inputs reviewed: raw draft `output/drafts/claude/chapter_09.round_01.md`, Codex tic audit `output/critiques/codex/chapter_09.claude_tic_audit.md`, mechanical gate (76 WATCH, 0 open), chapter card 09, `output/style_and_voice.md`, `premise/READING_GUIDE.md`, `premise/premise.md`.

Stance note: the worksite craft prose in this chapter is largely inhabited — setting compound vs. lightweight spackle, raking light as a tool, flashing patches, the W-pattern wet edge all pass the smallness test, and the money pressure is mostly carried by real numbers (invoices paid in halves when the grant clears, high hundreds, pays late/pays real, lease up in December). The failures cluster where the chapter stops trusting that material and explains itself: two thesis paragraphs, several caption sentences that survived or were added after the Codex tic orders, and a handful of figures where the raw draft's literal precision was traded away. Three Codex tic-5 cut orders ("briefly and against her own policy," "with some effort," "apparently") were not executed in the integrated chapter; they resurface below where they intersect this audit's questions.

## 1. Which paragraphs feel portable to another novel?

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "This was the job. This was, in fact, the whole point of the job: you arrived, you made a damaged white room into an undamaged white room, you got paid, and nothing about the room remembered you." — A gig-economy thesis statement that could open a chapter of *The New Me* or any lapsed-artist freelancer novel unchanged; worse, it pre-states the erasure theme the dried wall at line 107 is built to earn. — ORDER: Cut or roughen the thesis clause ("nothing about the room remembered you"). Let the named clients (Parallel on Banker Street, the Bushwick photo lab, the framer's stretcher guy) and "Hands only. Nothing above the wrists required" set the mode. The erasure idea may land exactly once in this chapter, at the dried wall.

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "staying in New York had been a default, a thing she was doing the way the wall was beige, through neglect, on a drift. Leaving had been the only option with edges... and she had liked it better, she realized, when wanting to paint had no address at all. You could not fail to move into a thing that did not exist." — A leaving-New-York essay paragraph portable to any descendant of "Goodbye to All That"; the wall-beige analogy is the only owned element and it is harnessed to a roughly seventy-word balanced sentence, a "she realized," and a closing aphorism — the exact over-balanced chain Codex tic 10 ordered broken and tic 6 conditioned on thinning, neither of which happened. — ORDER: Keep at most one abstraction from this paragraph. Break the long sentence. Re-weight onto the objects already in the scene (the label pressed to the bucket, the cup turned once, the numbers about to be saved) and onto what changes in June's task or body, not in her thesis.

Checked and passing: the toggle-hole paragraph ("She knelt at the first toggle hole with the setting compound, the five-minute kind, because lightweight spackle would shrink into holes this size and show a dimple by spring") is the strongest counter-candidate — the craft logic is non-portable, June-optical, and specific to this room's hollow walls. It is the standard the two flagged paragraphs fail against.

## 2. Where does the prose summarize pressure rather than make the reader inhabit it?

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "she was watching the thing happen that she had not planned for: the city growing a handle." — June watches herself have the realization; the reading guide bans characters watching themselves feel things (§6), and the lunch beat's pressure is reported from managerial altitude one sentence after the late laugh already carried it. — ORDER: Cut the spectator frame entirely. The laugh arriving late, the cup turned on the bucket, and the two numbers saved at clock-out are the realization; do not narrate it happening to her. (The "handle" figure is ordered separately in section 4.)

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "The cover had not worked. Asha had seen the run and chosen the elevator anyway." — These two sentences caption the beat the reader just watched (Asha looked at the middle square, and at the run beneath it, and went to pad the elevator); this caption is new in the integrated chapter, not in the raw draft — explanatory residue added during repair. — ORDER: Cut both sentences. Keep "June set the foamcore face-down on the crate dolly before she could make another mark," which already carries the exposure and is the better addition.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "kept this to herself with some effort" — Restraint narrated instead of enacted; this is an unexecuted Codex tic-5 cut order. — ORDER: Replace the qualifier with what her hands do while she doesn't say it — her voice card specifies physical busyness under stress; she is already holding a ladder and carrying a folded invoice. Use them.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "She thought, briefly and against her own policy, of the rack at Marchetti Rooms" — The policy is asserted at the moment it breaks rather than shown breaking; also an unexecuted Codex cut order. — ORDER: Drop "briefly and against her own policy." The foamcore going into the tote at pack-out, against the tube, under the scarf, already proves the policy is failing.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "That was the job working as designed. She made herself say so, internally, in those words." — Theme stamped after the dried-wall paragraph has already earned it ("prove she had been in it"), and "in those words" certifies the narration's own phrasing instead of giving June an action; Codex tic 7 ordered this stamp cut or attached to action, and the repair instead added meta. — ORDER: Cut, or reduce to "She made herself say so" attached to a close-out action (roller spun clean, knife wiped). The previous paragraph is the keeper; this one is the third statement of a theme that gets one.

Checked and passing: the strongest counter-candidate is "A door you could open at night. A wall you did not have to ask permission to use. Regular money arriving on a schedule instead of forty-five days after an invoice." The fragment chain has a polished cadence, but it passes because the offer is converted into rooms, keys, and invoice timing — exactly the materialization the chapter card demands — and the framing figure (examining words like a swatch, "looking for what they would do once they dried") is built from this chapter's own labor. The Philadelphia/New York pressure otherwise passes the press: rent in "high hundreds," the armory that "pays late. Pays real," Marisol's halved invoices, the December lease.

## 3. Where does dialogue sound polished, therapeutic, or aphoristic?

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "I've said yes to stable things that ate my painting time. I've also said no to rent money and hated myself by Tuesday. That's not advice." — Asha compresses nine years into a balanced antithesis with a disclaimer button; she is too articulate about her own life pattern, delivering it pre-resolved. Her voice card specifies fast, plain, work-network shorthand, explicitly "less polished than Nia." The under-pressure version names one specific job and stops, or loses the second half. — ORDER: Replace the couplet with one concrete instance (a named gig, a month, what it paid) and let the parallel half go unfinished or unsaid. Cut "That's not advice" — the disclaimer performs the aphorism's self-awareness instead of removing it.

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "Don't make her chase you. That's rude even when everyone is broke." — Second coined maxim in Asha's mouth in the same stretch; the raw draft's version ("Even a no should be fast. That's just manners.") was the same problem, and the repair swapped one epigram for another. — ORDER: Keep "Don't make her chase you." Replace the maxim tail with logistics in her register — when it posts, who else Nia will call.

Checked and passing: June's "The math down there works. The math here is a hobby I do at night" is the strongest counter-candidate — it is epigram-shaped, but it passes as her card's self-aimed joke, it follows the plain unguarded "I don't know" (plain-speech floor satisfied), and "math" is her deflection made visible as deflection. Asha's "It's bad on purpose, I think, at this point" passes because the hedges roughen it out of aphorism. Nia's text reads composed because it is a written text — polish is in-world, and "You'd be good at the parts nobody romanticizes" matches her card's sanctioned register. The walkthrough exchange ("Could this one be warmer?" / "It's the same paint") is fully functional and followable.

## 4. Where would literal precision beat figurative language?

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "a constellation of screw holes from the vinyl lettering crew" — Stock lyrical collective noun where the trade fact is more specific and more June: vinyl lettering screws follow the title. — ORDER: Replace with the literal pattern — a level line of screw holes at title height where the lettering crew shot the wall.

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "the city growing a handle" — A cute abstract coinage standing in for a fact the scene has already made concrete; the paragraph then has to explain the metaphor for four more clauses. — ORDER: Substitute the literal ledger: by the end of lunch, staying in New York has a rent figure, a freight elevator, and two phone numbers. Let those nouns do the gripping; no figure needed.

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "alphabetized together as if that settled anything" — The editorial tail tells the reader the irony, and the figure is slightly false to the screen: both saved contacts are New York; Philadelphia is the unanswered Nia thread sitting above the deli's order confirmation — which is the better literal image and is already in the same paragraph. — ORDER: Cut "as if that settled anything" and let the paragraph end on the literal screen — the unanswered thread above the deli confirmation, the cursor blinked at and backed out of.

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "a valve she had spent too long assuming was hand-tight" — The figure itself is craft-true, but the repair traded the raw draft's literal "two years" for "too long"; precision regressed during revision. — ORDER: Restore the count ("two years," consistent with canon's slow quiet quit). Keep "hand-tight."

Checked and passing: "a clean shape announcing itself like a price sticker" is the strongest counter-candidate and passes — the image is optical, correctly scaled, and a price sticker is a gallery object arriving in the one room where it doesn't belong yet; the literal alternative ("a hard-edged rectangle a step cooler") loses that second register. Note also that the repair already demonstrated the right instinct twice — "joined the historical record" became "stuck to dried drips from older jobs," and the polygraph-result signature became "looked nothing like her name" — both literal substitutions that outperform the figures they replaced. The four orders above ask for the same move to be finished.

## Chapter verdict

`LLM-CLEAN-FOUND` — 13 orders: 2 portable-paragraph, 5 summarized-pressure, 2 polished-dialogue, 4 figurative-where-literal. Three of these (the policy qualifier, "with some effort," the working-as-designed stamp) are unexecuted or regressed Codex tic-audit orders and should be treated as carryover debt, not new findings. The wall-job craft, the money specificity, and the walkthrough scene pass and must not be flattened while the orders are executed.
