The good news is: you're already doing what most people find the hardest part. The key reason behind why you see so much advice about "just write" is that, while there's other things that are important or just often useful, the one piece that is
strictly necessary is "keep writing". For a lot of people, if it's not coming out instantly and at high quality, they sort of give up and look for a magic bullet.
For you, I see a million words of fiction in User Fiction, all from within the last two years. Good job! Even if you find you need to let up a bit on volume, that's fine. You have passed this hurdle that stops an extremely large amount of would-be writers.
You've also passed what often ends up being the second hurdle, that of writing with intent. Some people start writing and just go seat of their pants: no outlining efforts, sometimes not even basic spellcheck-level editing. You've passed this part, too, by your description of the situation and what I see when I look.
So, that means that we get to the bad news. It's at the point where you need to dig into what is and isn't working for you, which probably will require you to find a long-term partner to give harsh feedback. I can't be that; my schedule is too discombobulated to try. But I have a little time today, so let's look at
Healing, as your most recent work I see here on SV.
The opening post for Healing does several things right: you start by giving us a hook in the first paragraph. Zeke has a 'membranous wing', which implicitly requires explanation. There's the aftermath of a conflict, which clearly shapes who Zeke is and what situation he's in. We get one emotional tie to all this, where Zeke tells us that the devastation is the result of 'madness', which seems to be a value judgment from him. You build on this to set a scene. We find out Zeke has four arms and a carapace, and he's in a world that has IFF and air defense turrets and lasers and cars, but also has priests and cathedrals in prominence. Zeke is referred to as "Blessed One", which is the title we've already seen attached to the one whose 'madness' caused this ruin.
Those are all correct things and show that, yeah, you have been trying to be a good writer, studying things carefully and trying to implement them. The wrinkle is that digging in any deeper doesn't quite cohere for me. Who is Zeke? I don't know. He'll try to help a woman in distress, but gets rebuffed and stops. What is his connection to things here? Well, he seems to be local-ish, even if he's scary to normal humans, He doesn't want to hurt people. That's good, but doesn't tell me much. It's clear that Zeke's history and nature is something you're planning to reveal in stages: some of what we, the reader, don't know is just because we're new to the world of the story, and a little more explanation of things will be forthcoming, but he probably also has secrets. So there should be, in rough order over the next updates: a better understanding of the status quo in the setting, a few hints to his secrets, and finally revelations that will recontextualize who and what he is, which will gradually come over the subsequent updates. This part is fine
if we hit one further thing.
What I look for here and don't see is a little more connection to why I should want to spend time with Zeke and this story. There's no single right answer, here: anything can work if the writer makes it work. The POV sticks close to him, but we don't see much of his internality. Is he sad that the healers stopped him from trying to help? Is he relieved that he doesn't have to try, because of a guilty irrational feeling that he'll make things worse? Is his body too optimized for war to be able to safely carry a patient and that tears him up inside? He 'doesn't mind' the AI hologram, but that doesn't tell me anything: he could be annoyed at their pretense of mind without actual free will, he could be pleased that their presence allows more workers to join the war effort, he could have religious objections from his upbringing that he's working his way through, or anything else. Probably all of those examples are wrong for your story, which is fine, they're just examples, but something like that gives me more connection to Zeke and to the setting.
A viewpoint character can be a tragic figure we want to see move past their traumas, a funny character we want to hear speak more, an innocent who implicitly will have their innocence challenged in the story's near future, a cipher we want to understand, a complete asshole we want to see get their due, or anything else. With the right writer and the right story, almost anything can work, but Zeke in this opening doesn't give me enough to care much about him and his setting. He 'doesn't mind' that the patient and holo-doc leave him be. To try to be usefully pithy, will he also not mind if I leave him be?
I can tell that you have a plan, but you need to tip your cards a little more so that a reader will want to connect with this character. If I or someone else is going to spend hours of our lives reading Zeke's story, we want to know he's someone we want to hang out with. Show me who he is, how he interacts with his world, what sort of challenges he'll face and why I want to see him succeed or fail.
You sometimes have thoughts out of order. Not intentionally, but they'd often work better if you just... put them in other orders. This is an example: I'm just going to rearrange six paragraphs and change nothing else.
"I thought you were lost," the man laughed good-naturedly and held out his hand. "Hanno Reingold."
"Zeke Bloodrave." The soldier leaned forward and shook the doctor's hand. "You're holding up well for an Iternian, sir. I once had a reporter pass out when I landed next to her."
"Not gonna lie, a month ago I would have been scared of you, Zeke." Hanno smiled and tapped his chitin scute. "But after the bedlam and chaos that happened recently, I'm too busy to be afraid. After me."
Hanno was a Normie—an ordinary man. His brown eyes were clear, his skin clean of scars. Like all Iternians, he looked young, but that meant nothing. Iterna possessed and perfected the technology of the ancients, making rejuvenation technology so cheap that it was freely available to every one of its inhabitants. To these people, the loss of a limb or organ was nothing; their medicine easily cloned any organ. When the corporations of Iterna offered their assistance in rebuilding in exchange for construction contracts, the Oathtakers readily agreed to allow Iterna to open clinics on their lands.
The lands of Iterna were untouched by the ravages of the Glow, thanks to the force shield that protected the country. The people there never experienced the suffering, hunger, and thirst of the others during the Extinction. Their bodies had not been altered; only a few had received the gifts so common in the New World.
Zeke's appearance often scared Normies. His faceted eyes were pools of impenetrable darkness; the sharpest of mandibles replaced his lips. Brown chitin plates covered his four-meter body. The gifts of the Eternal Shifter did not stop with his appearance. Muscles served him instead of bones; his brain was able to accelerate the perception of time, allowing the soldier to see a flying projectile in slow motion. A tactical belt encircled his waist. In one pocket of the belt was an ID card, and in the second was a terminal, a small portable computer that warned the doctor of his arrival.
This could be improved a bit further with some light re-writes, I think, but I hope that it's clear why I put it in the order I did. In the original, Zeke says something, then we stop to talk about Iterna, then we talk about Normies, then we say Zeke often scares Normies with a paragraph that infodumps more about his appearance, and
then we have the doc say "oh, I'm not scared". The exposition meandered and, crucially, interrupted the conversation. In the original order, Hanno feels like he's responding telepathically to Zeke thinking about how he's scary, because we stopped to talk about geopolitics and history and different people-groups between when Zeke introduced himself and when Hanno responded. In the order I used, we have introduction-response-context. Try to keep conversations together and tack exposition either before or after the conversation, unless it's
really important that it go between lines they say. I see this elsewhere in this chapter, too, but this was the most obvious example.
A simpler problem: the girl and the dentist scene. It's a little too wacky to feel coherent. The girl knows and easily employs the word 'sadist', but doesn't know what the dentist is and jumps way too far for what 'a tiny needle' will do to her. A little levity is fine and this is the right place for it, but "kid cries about going to the dentist" makes me think she's well under ten years old, while "identifies a racial/national group and calls them sadists" feels weird for someone who's not at least a teenager. You have the bones of a useful scene here, but it needs to either make the little girl into just a little girl, or make her into a precocious youth intentionally acting up. Probably the former.
After this, the scene shows us something about how the world has implicitly changed as we meet Malformed and mutants and Blessed and this mostly works. You're telling me a lot about the setting by picking out efficient little details that describe the whole. The dissonant part is that this now jarringly conflicts with what I thought about the "madness of the Blessed One" in paragraph one. There's not
one "Blessed One". It's a category. This is too early in the story for me to be thrown by this. Every time that a recontextualization is jarring instead of intriguing, it's a way to lose a reader. We haven't read that far, yet, so it'd be easy to not come back for Chapter 2. Try to be careful that you don't mislead readers.
To summarize: I see about 75% of a good opening here. You did your worldbuilding (I can see that even if I don't know the details yet), you are close to figuring out how to make a good plot/situation-based ending hook with this 'imprint' quasi-mystery, you know how to sprinkle in fun background things, I have some feel for what's going on and it's reasonably interesting. The last 25% or so is a bit of a doozy, unfortunately: I need to feel a bit more of Zeke's internality and I need a little more connection to him, and I need to know at least enough about what
category of secrets Zeke is not sharing to know if I want to hang out with him for longer. I also need a few other little things to not drag it down, the type I mentioned above already.
I glanced over Hordedoom, as well, and didn't have any significantly different responses to skimming things. Overall, you're close, and once you get a handle on that last bit, it'll just be a matter of finding the correct audience to appreciate your work.
Don't be so down on yourself: Yeah, you have ground you'll need to cover, but your writing is serviceable, the one story I looked into starts reasonably strong, your prose needs a little more coherence in ways you can learn, your characters need to reveal themselves to the reader a little more, and
you are actively trying to improve on all this. Creativity can become a mechanical, iterative process. There's no need to be smart: the famous and much-beloved Terry Prachett commented how a lot of his ideas came from just giving dumb and obvious answers to situations and then exploring them (for example: "Death rides a horse? Well, then someone has to clean the stable."). Talent is a head start, but not something that wins a marathon. Find the coach that will help you run that full marathon.
