About the work

A closer look.

You repeat it at dinner: a date, a name, a 'they say', a line from a letter, a fact in a draft you are about to publish. Nobody has ever checked it. Send me one claim, written exactly the way you say it. I go to the record and come back with: what the source actually says, quoted; where it lives; and a straight verdict. It holds. It holds partly, and here is the part that does not. It does not hold, and here is what the record says instead. If the record cannot settle it, you get that in writing too, plus the list of where I looked. Two independent sources minimum. I look hardest at the too-clean line: the date that feels convenient, the name nobody can trace, the detail everyone repeats and nobody cites. For a writer, this is a pre-publication check. For everyone else, it is the one fact you have been carrying around unchecked for years. Two days. Written notes, claim by claim, with links. One revision.