First time reading through I found it really quite confusing and a little difficult to understand. However, once I knew the 'twist' that Hank is a dod I reread and it did make a bit more sense. The reason for this is that there appear to be quite a few viewpoint shifts. You switch from what is basically Selma's view to what is sort of Hank's point of view quite frequently and often in the same paragraph, which is very confusing. An example of this would be where you have the line "She never r...

I have to admit from your stated goals it doesn't really feel like a fully rounded story, as such. Although you indicate there's a something that came from Asia it isn't clear what it is. Is it a plague? Terorrist/Fundamentalists? Or some sort of monsters? Aliens? Or even zombies. Obviously some of those are more outlandish than others, but I couldn't see anything that really indicates what it is these people are refugees from. For example, the crowd isn't really spurred into action because o...

My main criticism is that it's quite passive. You're simply telling us what happened and robbing it of much of the drama that the events suggest is actually there. I would turn this into two active scenes. Give us some background on Leila and her gardening. Give us the dialogue of her phoning her sister and make the whole delivery scene dramatic and tense. If you really want to grab my attention I want to know I'm in for a roller-coaster ride of emotions and you can let me know that by having...

There are two main problems I would focus on. First off--you're info-dumping. You've got loads of explanation here, with very little of the action you hint at. In fact, there's so much it almost sounds like the summary at a start of the second novel in a series. Unless that novel exists, you don't want to be doing this in the prologue, but it's so much info to assimilate for your reader they may well be turned off. If you want to really this stuff it really needs to be done via active scenes....

The piece has a couple of structural problems, I would say. First and foremost is that you're info-dumping. You tell us a lot of stuff--everything from the fact that Alex's brother died of cancer to the fact he likes to work in a loud office. Now, ideally you should be showing us all those thing--a flashback to him and his brother on the swings, show us him working in a loud office with the door open. However, in practice it could get a little tedious to have everything, so you need to isolat...

I got a little confused towards the end. I think part of your aim is to convey a degree of confusion--they've been hit hard and it's a big mess--but this is more confusion as to who is who. What I mean is at the end you use "he" quite bit and it's confusing which he you mean. Specifically, when you say "I sit down beside him and hold his hand." I got mixed up whether the narrator was sitting next to the dying boy or the sergeant. This is easily fixed--just refer to the sergeant as "the sergea...

I appreciate it's a first draft but mainly I'm left a little confused as to what the actual story is here. A better structure for this would be to start in the middle of some action. It sounds like you're setting up a conflict between these guys and some military types when they try to steal something. If that's the case I'd jump right in at that point. Start with some action, get the readers blood pumping from the get go. I would avoid the expositional stuff altogether, tbh, especially loadi...

I'll understand if you want to refund this as I haven't read it all, only Chapter 6. The big problem here is that you're telling the readers everything. This is what makes first person so tricky--it's very easy to slip into telling us things when really you should be showing us. For example, with the DIRE building you tell us what all the levels are. If these levels are important you need to have the character walk through them and describe them. You need to give the reader the chance to deci...

I have to admit I found the whole piece rather tough going. It seems to launch into the middle of something with the narrator talking about things as if we already know what's going on. You're also giving us a massive info-dump. That sort of thing should be avoided anyway, but putting one up front is a big turn-off for readers. I would start with the section where she is listening in on them. Perhaps bits of the info-dump could be interspersed with actual dialogue as explanations your narrato...

The start is a bit of an info-dump. For some reason it popped into my head that the first part could work well if you had a reporter interview Winston (or maybe someone could be reading the interview as an article?). You could then have the reporter ask stuff, like has he considered running for leader of the party and he could give one of those non-committal answers typical of politicians. The back-stabbing comments could be what he overhears when leaving the interview, maybe? From a structur...