Title: Keeping Secrets
Author: CarlottaOrCarly
What is 'Keeping Secrets'?
        It's an ongoing, medium-length story about a girl who told a secret that ultimately led to a web of lies spiralling out from around her.

Blurb/Book Description:
         'This is a guide, that will help you through your life. Help you learn from the mistakes I've made as a teenager. The lies I keep up. Sure, my life was good at first. Lying was easy, but with a huge secret...it just gets harder and harder.

Use this guide to learn from my wisdom as a college student. Sure, I'm not the brightest. That would be Rider. Everyone gets wisdom from living life. I sure have been living life, just the wrong way...'

Rating -
     5.8/10

EBI - 
     The tenses in the story change quite a bit... Like, there's quite a few moments where it'll be past tense and then go straight to present, and then back, and it'll just repeat a cycle of tenses. It's not that noticeable sometimes, but it does make a difference to the story.

The Grammar mistakes of not knowing whether to put 'you're' or 'your' in some places also really lets the story down. Of course, for some people it may not be an issue and it's not really noticeable so doesn't make a difference, but for others it can mean all the difference between a good story and a bad story. Also, some people tend to read 'you're' as 'you are' to check if it works, even in other people's stories, and if the reader were to do this and it not fit, then the flow of the sentence would be disrupted, and the flow of a sentence is really important in a story. Plus, there's the difference between 'they're', 'their', and 'there'.

It's like the difference between, 'Yesterday I went to the shop, but then there wasn't what I wanted, so I went home.', and 'I went shop yesterday to, but there wasn't what I wanted then, I went home so'.

Also, the punctuation mishaps disrupt the sentences the most. For example, the use of commas in the wrong places. A comma is used so that the reader can take a break, or to show that the speaker took a break, or even just as a plain break in the sentence so that it makes more sense and flows more easily.

For example, 'I said before, I buckled up my seatbelt'. The point is, it makes the sentences feel quite detached and disjointed, rather than smooth and fluid.

Also, the sentences are always really short - they're never complex. You could use ; to join two sentences together, or more commas, brackets, or -s to make the sentences a lot more compound and therefore more satisfying at points.

The last 'EBI/Even Better If' is about the capitalisations of 'mom/Mom'. Some places you capitalise it, and other places you don't - the inconsistencies aren't good, though, because they just seem unprofessional. It's almost as if changing from Mrs to Miss to Ms, but a lot more subtly and a lot more dialled down in importance.

The best thing to do to avoid mistakes/typos/errors in the future would be to read through every chapter before you post it and just double check everything, or even read other stories a lot more often to see what other authors do and where they use certain words and punctuation, and that way, you'll probably end up writing the mistakes less often too, which will make reading through and drafting it a lot easier.

Also, please don't be disheartened by the EBIs - they're only to help you, not to insult you or make you feel bad. Every story had an EBI, even the stories that the best authors look up to.

Review -
            'Keeping Secrets' has an intricate plot line with some developed characters, to the extent of wondering, as a reader and a third-party, whose side you should be on. It opens excitedly with a straight-up situation being given and then resolved, with one clear problem which then leads to others. Just in reading the first few chapters, foreshadowing is completely evident, and it only makes the reader want to find out every single detail that's about to be exploited.
There are somewhat mistakes within the story, but what story doesn't have its downfall, right?
The plot is one of the main successes, because already it has begun to spiral just from the first chapter into the second and then the third.
The character of Vanessa is also not only entertaining but mysterious and almost badass, which totally brings the reader towards fist-pumping the air!

Recommended?
        Yes, I do recommend 'Keeping Secrets', as long as you don't wince at mistakes or have GPS or OCD.

Fancy taking a look?
It's on these profiles - 
DarlingDisgrace and CarlottaOrCarly

P.S - If you fix any mistakes and want me to go back over the story and craft a new review, I will absolutely be more than happy to do so.

Sorry if the review is not what you expected or if you feel insulted - just please remember that the point is to help you, especially with the EBI, and that Readers looking for their next story should only really look to the Review section.

Thanks,
DarlingDisgrace.