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Second-Hand Dragons · making of

Working file from the writing process. Contains spoilers for the whole book.

Status: Second-Hand Dragons (book 3)

Stage: COMPLETE 2026-10-19 (re-narrated in af_heart). Audiobook: audio/Second-Hand Dragons.m4b (101.7 min, 13 chapters, cover, -19.4 LUFS) + audio/chNN.mp3; copied to export/Audiobooks/.

# Stage State
0 Seed done, seed.md
1 Story bible done, story-bible.md (all proposals approved)
2 Outline done, outline.md (approved)
3 Draft done, 13 chapters
4 Edit one revision pass (timeline, numbers, rule clarity, tics; see continuity.md "rev")
5 Reader test done (fresh subagent, read cold); findings below, all top five fixed
6 Speech flow scan clean except deliberate lines; rule tests 11/11 pass
7 Audio prep done, audio/chNN.txt; Aldevar has a phoneme override
8 Narrate done, af_heart, speed 0.95, 101.7 min. Author 2026-10-19: same voice as The One in the Chair (the first render, published 2026-10-18, used bm_george)
9 Listen check done (af_heart). One confirmed pattern: "I want it on the record" heard as "I wanted on the record" (4×), so it was rephrased to "Let the record show that…" in ch03/05/07/10 (training case 08, proposal P3). The rest is small-word noise ("this"/"the") and "bought" as "bot" (American)
10 Package done; cover.jpg drawn by cover.py; chapter WAVs deleted (rebuild from the cache with kokoro-narrate)
Ch Title Words
01 Pledged 1524
02 Cold Coal 1323
03 A Light Next Door 1321
04 Thursdays 1246
05 The Thermometer 1417
06 Eleven Years 1296
07 Lot Nineteen 1484
08 The First Flame 1435
09 The Widow's Grate 1463
10 Pencil 1548
11 The Reckoning 1694
12 House to House 1498
13 Given 1322
Total 18,571

Reader test (2026-10-18), summary

Understood the plot, the rule and every character's want without the bible. Best scenes: "you were very badly priced" (ch7), the unasked flame (ch8), "Then I suppose I'm useful" (ch9), the widow refusing to buy him (ch11), the fourth bar (ch13). Top fixes, all applied: 1. The climax seemed to break the rule (sold before he gave): now explicit that possession passes at noon, and whatever fire is left at noon is the Guild's, which is also why he gives everything. 2. "Withdrawn" now has a mechanism (only the ticket holder can withdraw; a pledge with no ticket is no pledge). "You'd have gone cold" changed to plain speech. 3. Mrs Hobb's father kept the shop until after the flood; Quill's unlisted status is set up in ch6. 4. Tics trimmed ("I heard", "on the record", similes); "Aldevar" is now named in ch1, so "Al" makes sense. 5. The skipped last week gets a time stamp at the top of ch11.

Not changed: the ending's tidiness (the warm ending was the author's choice), Strand's quick turn (he has the thermometer and the lamplighter's cold flame as evidence).

Open questions