# A Day's Walk

*How We Lost the Ability to Tell What Matters*

**Czech candidates:** *Na den chůze* · *Co se nás týká* · *Blízko a daleko*

Book One, and the flagship. 70–80k words, 12 chapters in four parts, framed as an eight-day walk on the Stezka Českou Kanadou from Jindřichův Hradec to Dačice.

**The argument in one sentence:** the problem isn't that we pay too little attention, it's that the machinery deciding what deserves attention is being fed information it was never built to sort — and the fix is retriage, not abstinence.

## Files

| File | What it's for |
|---|---|
| **`CHAPTERS.md`** | **The drafting document.** Walk spine, opening scene and numbered argument beats for all 14 units, and the argument ledger. |
| `CRAFT.md` | How it's written. Register, the five rules, recurring objects, banned language. |
| `FIELD_BRIEF.md` | What to capture on the trail. Carry this. |
| `OUTLINE.md` | Strategic rationale for the book's shape. Superseded by `CHAPTERS.md` for drafting. |
| `drafts/` | Prologue, ch 3, ch 5. Register tests — the specifics are placeholders. |

Claims are governed by `../theory/EVIDENCE.md`.

## Before drafting anything

1. Read `CRAFT.md`. The whole book fails in one paragraph if the register slips.
2. Check the chapter's tier in `../theory/EVIDENCE.md`. Most of Part II is Tier C and must read as hypothesis.
3. Check the argument ledger at the bottom of `CHAPTERS.md`. Every claim has a place it's raised and a place it's paid off; the usual way to break the book is cutting a chapter-5 paragraph and silently orphaning chapter 11.

## What's blocking

The three drafts are built on invented ground — a pond that doesn't exist, a man with an axe, a stone step in a forest nobody has walked to. The architecture holds. The material doesn't exist yet.

**Walk stages 3–6 consecutively.** Four days, ~62 km, and it yields chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 — the core of the book. Stages 5 and 6 must not be separated; chapter 6 only works if the previous day was spent among the emptied villages with the phone off the whole run.

Before going, work through the map-verification list in `FIELD_BRIEF.md` — the tower's position, which villages are reachable, which pond has the right shape. An hour settles most of what the drafts currently guess at.