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Review by Sunshine: Mystery of the Olds

Title: Mystery of the Olds

Author: ChrisJebby

Summary: 2/5

Some good things happening in your summary. I like that you tried to capture the mystery/thriller nature of the story, and the genre is very clearly expressed through the writing. However, I would definitely consider revising your summary for the following reasons:

Grammatically, it's a bit of a mess – and that can be a massive turn-off for readers. Another thing is that there is too much missing information, and not enough stakes or conflict at hand. No worries, though – I'm here to help! I've pasted your current summary below, and we will go through it bit by bit. First of all:

Hidden mysteries are unravelled...

When a CEO with a cold personality meets with the most challenging woman, he wouldn't have ever thought existed.

It is incredibly unclear whether the first part and that second part are supposed to be one sentence. I certainly hope they are, because that sentence is incomplete without it. Also, the comma in that second part is entirely unnecessary and actually disrupts the fluency of that sentence. If we polish it up, we get something a bit more like:

Hidden mysteries are unravelled when a cold CEO meets the most challenging woman to ever exist.

Before we move onto the next part, I just want to say that I found the use of asterisks unnecessary. They are not needed. Anyways, next part:

Clara – a bright an easygoing girl with an unclear past decided to join the magazine company for one of the most successful business corporation in the world, hereby fulfilling her children dreams...

But soon things got twisted when her over inquisitiveness seems to put her in trouble.

Okay, now I'm seeing some major issues. First of all, you change from present to past tense, which I'll discuss more in the next section of this review. You do, however, need to fix that up. The word 'corporation' should be in plural form, "easy-going" should be spelt with the little hyphen in between the two words, and the ellipses are completely unnecessary and don't serve any purpose.

Now, onto the major issues: we're missing the conflict and the stakes. Why does her inquisitiveness put her in trouble? I know you're trying to keep it ambiguous, but you need to hint at the conflict. Readers should get a taste of what this trouble might look like and why it might arise. We want to know what's the risk – what sort of 'trouble' is Clara in? You should let us know so that we feel the urge to read on and make sure Clara is alright. 

Grammar: 2/5

For me, this was your biggest draw-back, which is such a shame because the content of the story was actually quite interesting, but it was very hard to enjoy it when I kept having to take notes on grammar and punctuation mistakes. Anyways, I'll break them down for you here:

As mentioned above, your tenses are definitely a little messy. You keep switching from past to present to past. For example:

"It wasn't what I anticipated. It is a call from Mrs Garcia."

That above example from your story demonstrates the inconsistency in the tenses. I'll break it down more:

"It wasn't what I expected." [wasn't = past tense]

"It is a call from Mrs Garcia." [it is = present tense]

You need to choose one and stick to it throughout your story.