There are so many different types and styles of writing and people do it for many reasons. No matter what you are writing or why you are writing though there are ways to become a better writer.

1. Be willing to edit and rewrite and edit and rewrite. Do not expect the first draft to be the final draft. Good writing takes practice and lots of rewrites.

2. Get feedback on your writing - share it with other writers and with other readers.

3. Know that when someone is giving you feedback (whether nicely or not), it is only their opinion, do not take it personally. Take what you can from their feedback to learn from it and let the rest go.

4. Take some writing courses, there is always something to be learned from them.

5. Read a lot, not only in what you are writing but other styles and other genres. Figure out what you like and don't like.

6. When you read something that really grabs your attention, analyze it. What made it so good?

7. Experiment with your writing - try a different style, write in a different tense, write about something you normally wouldn't - it can show you many different aspects to your writing. Be adventurous.
8. If one writing project is keeping you stuck, switch up what you're writing. Go write something else and come back to that piece at a later time.

9. Practice - write, write, write... it sounds easy but it really is about taking time to sit down and just write about anything.

10. At some point you need to take the leap and put yourself out there. No matter what you write there is an audience waiting to read it and it will be your greatest learning.

Writing is an adventure that is meant to be enjoyed not endured. Happy Writing.

Award winning author, Maggie Thom, took the challenge and leapt off, leaving a fulltime, twenty year career in management, to write full time. After publishing her first suspense/thriller book Captured Lies, October 2012, she published her second novel, Tainted Waters, April, 2013. Tainted Waters went on to win 2013 Suspense and Thriller Book of the Year through Turning the Pages Magazine and Captured Lies won book of the Month through LAS Reviews (February 2014). She published her third novel, Deceitful Truths (The Caspian Wine Series - Book 2), March 2014. An avid reader and writer her whole life, she decided to break the monotony of wishing to be an author by making it happen. She is a wholehearted nature lover and likes nothing better than to take a book, hike to a remote spot by a river or waterfalls and read. Married to her best friend, she is learning that humor, love and patience help her navigate her way through her twins’ teen years.

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He didn’t commit suicide but who’s going to believe her...

Frustrated at being fired from her latest job and overwhelmed by her consolatory family, Sam decides to move to the family’s cabin at the lake. A place she hasn’t been since her dad committed suicide there, twenty years before. Or did he? Snooping is something she’s good at but someone seems to be taking offense to her looking too closely at what has been happening at the lake. What she discovers is shocking. Now she must uncover what’s real and what’s not. All that she learned growing up, may be false.

Keegan, who has recently moved to the area to finish his latest book, is also trying to find out if his grandfather, who’d passed away ten years before, died of natural causes or was murdered? The descendants of the four families, who own the land around the lagoon, are dying off.

Since Sam and Keegan are the only ones questioning the deaths, they find themselves working together to seek the truth. Are people being murdered? Who would benefit from their deaths? Why would there be barricades and armed guards at the north end of the lake? To stay alive, Sam and Keegan must find the answers and convince others, before more people are killed... including them.