I love the paint swatch detail, and that would have made a lot more sense if you found some way to work it in. Nice!

Thank you so much for taking the time. These are pretty much all different comments than I had last time, so that's good (I think)! I also included a summary of the book's blurb with the last post, though, which gave a lot of background and probably changed perceptions.

About the thing with Bereavement Gray haze: I was thinking of it as a paint swatch color name. Like, the color you might see the world in if your only expression was a vacant stare.

Hey, I'm a first time critic? Critiquer? I enjoyed the read. I haven't read the original so if I duplicate something you already know, my apologies.

**GENERAL NOTES**

I like starting off a story without knowing everything (my own writings of late has a lot of that!) so that’s a pleasant finding. We get to relax and just experience with the characters instead of an infodump of exposition.

That being said there’s a lot I just “didn’t get”. We start off with the MC having a voice in their head and the MC wondering if it’s Alex’s voice, not theirs, and Alex is a she. Sharing the space again sort of suggests a possession or some other scifi/fantasy thing with someone’s mind in your mind. Onboard AI? Don’t know yet. It doesn’t sound like internal self-talk and the MC has hinted it’s not.

We also get talk about alcohol and tremors, that’s interesting, perhaps an alcoholic.

More self talk (Get Up) and then more self-talk but not in italics, that suggests the italic dialog is definitely no

Holy shit holy shit. Okay. Holy crap that was so much useful information.

So: first things first, I never intended for the desert to be like, life-threateningly hot. It comes up again in the third chapter and I describe it as 80ish degrees fahrenheit, lol. But now I'm questioning whether THAT'S unrealistic. I mean, you're right, that's not what people think when they see sand dunes. 

My thinking was that I'd have her in a situation where she couldn't get to alcohol in a place that would be uncomfortably warm for most people, but hell for her, because she's gonna withdraw without medical intervention. When she comes back here in the third chapter, it picks up where the prologue left off, she passes out, gets rescued by aliens and brought to civilization, and experiences some altered LOC and actual tactile hallucinations at that time, related to withdrawal. 

But none of that matters if the reader is thinking, "What the fuck, how is she not dead? This is trash." Maybe I should explore 

Here’s what I think someone suffering from extreme hyperthermia is going to sound like, especially in first person present tense: like their brain makes no goddamn sense. Like it’s a puddle of words and thoughts and observations that don’t quite connect in a way that’s logical for a narrative like this. You can dodge this problem with third person because the narrator can take the reins of a character that’s losing their senses, but in first person, you aren’t afforded with that benefit. At least not in present tense, when the reader experiences the character’s perceptions right as the character does. If you changed to past tense, I think you could make an argument for more coherent prose (maybe even prose sort of like this) because the character is narrating it from the present and have a clear state of mind, and they can separate the soup from the meat, if you know what I mean. But present tense? I don’t know. I don’t think Alex’s thoughts would be very coherent at all, and certainly

But Cy, you might object, how on earth is Alex’s body temperature going to reach 110-111 degrees? If the average assumed temperature of our fictional desert is in the ~100-104 range, surely she can’t be cooking like a steak on a cast iron skillet, right? Well, let me first direct you to this little graphic, showing the internal temperature of a steak. [[delicious]](https://www.omahasteaks.com/blog/steak-doneness-guide/amp/)I like medium rare myself, but YMMV. 

>I cooked my steak to an internal temperature of 130 degrees F. in my oven set to a temperature of 170 degrees F., for 65 minutes and allowed it to rest for 10 minute; it was PERFECT.

Delicious! A wonderful medium rare steak only takes 65 minutes in an oven that’s set to 170 degrees. Which is another temperature that I want to bring your attention to. Why, you might ask? Well…. This little factoid in the Sahara Desert Wikipedia might pose a problem:

>Sand and ground temperatures are even more extreme. During daytime, the sand 

Hey,

I didn’t read or critique your first one because it looked like other folks had it handled, but I’ll do a dive into this version of your prologue.

**OVERALL IMPRESSION**

So, I want to start by saying that I really like your writing. It goes down smoothly, and the absence of obvious grammar or structure errors helps me immerse into it well. You vary your sentence lengths and structures, so the prose sings to me when I’m reading it, and that’s pretty rare. You have a good ear for sound and the pacing of an individual word in a sentence. Given the critiques I’ve seen you hand out, this doesn’t surprise me. You know your stuff. 

I think the premise seems solid in this too—granted, my assumptions might be wrong, but it seems like maybe when Alex reads a book, this alternate self (Alex but not Alex?) is transported somewhere, maybe into the book itself in a Pagemaster-esque way. It’s happened often enough that not-Alex knows to hang on until they switch back, but there still seems t

Thank you so much for taking the time and providing feedback. "Blurry and shaky" is great--that's pretty much the vibe I was going for.

GENERAL REMARKS  
This prologue is definitely interesting. It grabbed my attention and I knew I wanted to keep reading. Not sure how odd this will sound, but it kinda reminds me of the opening of a Call of Duty level. Those always start immediately after a helicopter crash or something and the POV is blurry and shaky and you’re not quite sure what’s going on.   
Some things are unclear, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. The Narrator and Alex’s relationship is kind of confusing. It seems like they’re multiple personalities in the same body?  
  
Same with the other characters you mention. Vero and Matt’s relationship with the narrator is also unclear, but your prologue is very short so I assume more details would come later.   
  
The narrator is suffering from alcohol withdrawals? Not sure if I read that part correctly.   
  
A narrator transported to a secondary world and lost in the desert and dying of thirst and sunburn is a little cliché, but I think you could do someth

Okay so I've been staring at this for so long I've forgotten how to read. I'm not even sure this is English anymore.

[Blackrange - Prologue](https://docs.google.com/document/d/12qG1_-1U6YFMH-3I-usL2JP5fd46oX4NwVO8c8sXGnI/edit?usp=sharing)

I took a bunch of the advice from the other day and removed stuff, added other stuff.

Where I focused my efforts:

-named the MC

-took out a bunch of action words (but not all; I wanted to keep the stuff that has to do with her fall and shoulder because it's, like, a metaphor hopefully)

-replaced some actions with feels

-gave her surroundings some actual descriptions

-gave her motivation

-sky description

Feedback: Is this better? Worse? English? Anything you have to say is welcome. 

Crits:

[[1890] Opening Chapter of Novel](https://old.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/saxc2j/1890_opening_chapter_of_novel/htxfr4z/)

[[1534] Gray Gods - Chapter 1](https://old.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/sb7mfi/1534_gray_gods_chapter_1/htyx6ak/) (Just in case the first one was a little short)

[830] Blackrange - Prologue (retry)