# Chapter 14 Positive Prose Audit

Source: `output/chapters/chapter_14.md` (revised), checked against `output/drafts/claude/chapter_14.round_01.md` (provenance), the Chapter 14 packet, `output/style_and_voice.md`, and `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §2/§6/§8. Report written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_14.positive_prose.md`.

Cold-read stance: skeptical professional editor. The revision executed most of the codex tic orders (evaluative `which` captions gone, narrator-philosopher glosses at raw lines 95/101/125/141 cut, the `not X, but Y` formula gone, June's and Theo's aphorism volleys de-polished). What remains is residue: stubs left where glosses were cut, one spent-family formula the sweep missed, and one surviving maxim. Findings below.

## 1. Portable paragraphs

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "She crossed to her panel and stood in front of it the way she stood in front of anything she'd made, head tipped, looking for the flaw first." — The universalizing habit-formula ("the way she X anything she'd made") is the recognitional construction the packet's spent-family list ordered refused after Ch13; the editor cut its sibling ("June read the way she painted," raw line 115) and missed this one. The clause could characterize any maker in any craft novel; only the head tip and the flaw-hunt are this book's. — ORDER: cut "the way she stood in front of anything she'd made"; keep the literal blocking ("head tipped, looking for the flaw first") and let repetition across chapters establish the habit instead of asserting it.

Checked and passed — the two zones the focused brief flagged:

- Flyer-photo aftermath: "The photo had missed the kiss and caught the two seconds following it, June's hand still closed on his jacket, his own eyes on her instead of the lens." The middle clauses are the genre's stock photo-evidence beat and would transfer to any fake-dating novel; the paragraph passes anyway because its frame is non-portable — he reads it "as if it were a delivery manifest" (his actual job furniture), the dropped brush from Ch13 sits at the bottom edge, and "No one would have to crop them apart." converts the beat into this thread's specific stakes via Mara's "Don't crop them apart this time, P." The portable clauses are doing evidence work inside a localized machine.
- Catalog handoff: "For a second they both held it. His hand stayed under the seam until her grip settled. Then he let go." The shared-grip beat is a romance staple, but the seam-and-weight transfer is art-handler craft, it is the chapter's one sanctioned hand foregrounding, and "Then he let go." is the trap completing — the sentence carries the discovery mechanism, not generic tenderness. Passes.

## 2. Summarized pressure

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "Since then, the tape had become something he noticed too quickly." — "Something" as emotion placeholder (explicitly banned in the packet's language checklist), reporting the post-kiss charge on June's praise from managerial altitude instead of enacting one over-noticing. The thread pays off in scene at the tape exchange ("Still the best thing in the room"), so this sentence pre-summarizes what the chapter later dramatizes. — ORDER: replace with one concrete instance of the too-quick noticing — e.g., he catches himself reading DECORATOR'S WHITE. FLAT. from across the room mid-task and makes himself finish the rack first. No abstraction.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "She looked at the cover and opened it straight to the back matter, hunting columns. He was grateful to her for it." — The hottest spot in the chapter — *Winter Kitchen* under June's hands, two feet from its painter's secret nephew — compressed to a single unanchored feeling-report. The raw draft's gloss ("in a way he couldn't have explained without explaining everything else") was rightly cut, but nothing lived replaced it; gratitude is named where the guide requires object/action first. — ORDER: convert the relief to action — the answer he had ready going unused, his pen resuming the pickup list, the held question she didn't ask. The reader should feel the near-miss pass through the room, not be told its emotional balance.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "Nine catalogs. Which years? He got the first three and the faded one and then lost the thread." — The chapter's thesis beat (inventory failing for the first time) is reported, not enacted: "the first three" withholds the years from the page, and "lost the thread" is a stock idiom sitting in the middle of otherwise exact prose. We're told the list failed instead of watching it fail. — ORDER: put the actual recall on the page and let it halt — three named years, the weak-tea one, then the blank where the fifth should be. The reader experiences the gap; no idiom.

Checked and passed — the focused "public documents" zone: "Public documents. Sold at the front desk for fifteen dollars, reviewed in print, shelved in libraries. Plate lists, install shots, short essays, lender lines. There was nothing in a public document that wasn't public. June wanted label language. The catalogs had it. He was helping." This is the strongest counter-candidate for summarized pressure and it passes: the staccato is rationalization happening in real time, the tautology sentence is the sound of a case being closed too fast, and the contents list stops one item short of the dangerous one ("lender lines," not acknowledgments) — the dread is enacted in what the list refuses to reach, which is exactly the packet's "thinking about labels, not acknowledgments" requirement. "He told himself the showcase had made Odile generous. He squared the top catalog with the others." passes on the same grounds: self-deception flagged by "told himself," displacement shown in the squaring.

## 3. Polished dialogue

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "There's a way to write one that's just facts and still does the work. I've seen them." — A craft maxim delivered with workshop fluency, portable verbatim to any art-world novel — it is also the book stating its own prose program through June's mouth. The scene says she's stuck (she refused a title; the label scares her); the line arrives pre-resolved. The under-pressure version withholds the principle and points at an instance, or fails to finish it. — ORDER: cut the maxim sentence; keep the self-interruption ("the label's going to be...") and "I want to see twenty of them in a row so I can hear the difference," which already carries the idea concretely and in her register. Preserve "people who weren't apologizing" — Odile's "Labels are not apologies." depends on it.

Checked and passed — the focused label/catalog-dialogue zone:

- "*Untitled (Stove)* is a title wearing a fake mustache." — The chapter's one quotable joke and the prime portability suspect. It passes: it is aimed at the exact problem June is solving (she refused a title; *Untitled* is her own move in disguise, and she's mocking it), it sits inside a volley Theo keeps functional and gallery-specific ("The parenthesis was probably Odile's condition." / "The checklist in back still files it under Stove."), and post-revision quotable density is inside the Emily-Henry-at-60% calibration — the raw draft's siblings ("Take it up with 1994," "nine pounds of someone's career," "kill the weak ones," "the facts are *chosen*") were all cut. One spark per scene, anchored, is the register working as specified.
- Theo's size speech ("Twelve-by-sixteen reads like a room you actually left at nine forty... Nobody gets to sprawl.") — Polished, but the polish is motivated on the page: the torn index card and "Wednesday at midnight he'd promised himself he would arrive with an opinion instead of a menu" frame it as rehearsed, the nine-forty detail is book-locked, and June's flat acceptance ("You're right about the sprawl.") refuses to escalate it into banter. Passes.
- Odile: "Labels are not apologies." / "What do I write, you are about to ask. Fewer words than you are planning." — Aphoristic, and licensed: she is the one character cleared for high-density lines, both target the label and the person rather than anyone's phrasing (no dialogue-diagnosis breach), and both are true partials consistent with her knowing. Passes.
- Plain-speech floor: met. "I'm keeping it." / "Show me the dead seven sometime." / "She said all of them." / "They're heavy. Spines crack." — every exchange is followable as text; Theo's "About Tuesday" → June's "Mara sent it" is deflection visible as deflection.

## 4. Figurative where literal would beat it

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "the two grounds and the half-card were waiting in a row" / "The small ground stayed between them, waiting for a pencil line." / "the small ground was waiting to become Tuesday's problem" — The same soft object-personification three times, after Ch13 repaired personification to zero and the packet ordered none; the third instance adds a cute narrator turn ("Tuesday's problem") on the closing page, where the prose can least afford whimsy. The blank panel's pressure is literal: nothing is on it. — ORDER: keep at most one "waiting" (the mid-chapter instance earns it best against the pencil June sets down and doesn't use); replace the other two with the literal fact — the grounds set out in a row; the ground still blank, no pencil line on it. Let blankness, not anthropomorphism, carry the unsolved joint piece.

Checked and passed:

- "faint as a watermark" (the chicken-thigh ghost) — print-register comparison, scale-true for a thin wash ghost under gray, and consistent with June's panel as established in Ch13. The literal alternative would lose the just-visible-at-an-angle quality the simile supplies. Passes.
- "the oldest one's top edge gone the color of weak tea where fifteen summers of window had reached it" — reads figurative but is a literal color observation plus a literal cause; this is the book's register working. Passes.
- "as if the mark belonged to someone else and she was appraising it for them" — an "as if" rather than the spent "the way a person" formula, and the appraisal frame is June's actual trade (art handler). Passes.

## Chapter verdict

`LLM-CLEAN-FOUND` — 6 findings, orders above: cut the habit-formula clause at the panel inspection; replace the "something he noticed too quickly" placeholder with one enacted over-noticing; ground the *Winter Kitchen* gratitude stub in action; enact the failed year-list instead of reporting it; cut June's label maxim sentence; reduce the tripled "waiting" personification to at most one literal-adjacent instance.
