So I found many writing tips throughout my years and I thought why not share them! :D Also writing sites that help. I love having a thesaurus on hand when I'm not being overly lazy. 

I found this website tonight when I was writing up the snowflake axe's description and I love it: Allusions
This is another good one I use a lot since I blank on what word I'm trying to use a lot >>: Free Dictionary

If you find yourself struggling to start writing just try to get the flow going with something simple. I have a bad habit of always going Angela sees or Calanthe smiled but to be honest it helps get me started and I've grown fond of that bad writing style simply because it helps me get into the spirit of role-play.

Now I may rp the all knower of earthly things but I do have to look up my geology this is a good website for it: Geology
Plants!
I used this site when designing areas on Revaliir and Angela's temple might help out with character development: Surreal Places
Places part 2
Finding random stuff will improve your writing a bit but how? Well when you include things like allusions and references you can better create the picture in your reader's mind. The one thing I'm good at is being a wordy birdy.

List of Legendary Creatures It helped a lot to know my history and have my research believe it or not I research a lot and while I suck at remembering most stuff I remember the most random things. 

I research a list of deities from mythology and have those present in my mind when writing Angela. I like being able to relate her to people like Xochiquetzal and other goddesses.

When writing the Harena Desert I made sure I decided what sand I wanted to use. Believe it or not there is a difference: ALL OF THE SAND

Adding flora to your posts gives them color I find especially in dead places like the desert: desert plants!

Research research research. :) I also like going off the norm and choosing things that people don't regularly hear. Like I could have used any fertility goddess but I went off the reg and picked Xochiquetzal. It makes your writing interesting and I also like spreading information about too. Ps. Ghost Orchids are wicked awesome.
Ghost Orchid
So are Green Jade Vine
Green Jade Vine
Green Jade Vine is native to the Philippines so I would imagine in Rev they would be found on Apoy Island -thumbs up-

Those are some interesting links, I actually have a couple books on gods and goddesses, and medieval weaponry lying around that I occasionally dig out when roleplaying or making characters. They're mostly Roman/Greek ones though.

Two tools that I occasionally use (mostly since I'm just getting back into Roleplaying) are this word counter https://wordcounter.net/ since sometimes I over, or under estimate how much I've written, but it also tells me if I'm over using some word… Which happens more often than I might like to admit. <.< 

The other tool is http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/experience which helps me pick a different one.

Other than those I have a number of translation sites if I want to get an exotic sounding name with a meaning, but I have more than I want to post here I think, unless someone wants them.

Also that Ghost Orchid is awesome.

I'm always finding stuff!

When I was creating the Rosenite Lore (which making your own unique race is super hard been working at this since I was 12 so :O 12 years now!) I didn't know exactly what I wanted. First I was like oh you know what combining plants and vampires would be cool and slowly I developed a name and making them much different then their undead counterparts (Rosenites have heartbeats! thanks to how much of them is actually living. It's just slower than most)

I also got the inspiration for most of their names being Natural from LJ Smith's Nightworld series. Natural born vampires in the books or Lamia have all Natural names like Ash, Oak, or other floral names. I thought it fit very well with what I wanted to do.

Angela has always had lore around her. I think she actually started off being the Goddess of Life in a short story I wrote before I started to rp as her. 

I chose the desert for Arri because I thought about safe places women would go if they wanted to escape the world. A paradise in the middle of a harsh desert made the most sense to me. 

I also wanted them to have something tragic because all races tend to and that's where their lack of having males came in. Putting it in pokemon statistics Rosenite women probably only have a 25% chance of having a male child since they miscarry most. :P

I also designed them heavily off Amazons cause it sounded cool when I was 12 and slowly I've been trying to make it my own.

I would delve into the lore more and more. When I was 15 I had a notebook full of words I made up for the Arriese language sadly I lost the notebook :(

Angela is iconic to me because unlike the vast majority of her siblings most of her children have gaelic or greek names. 

I couldn't bare to change most of their names so I gave them a reason to be so different compared to most of the others. Angela is named after the woman who helped Willow escape into the Harena Desert (Rev lore). Toya is named after one of Serenity's(their mother) favorite poets. Cathrine is named after her grandmother who is named after one of the elves who helped deliver the first born daughters of the Rosenites. Lily and Cyprus are natural names. Kyoto the girls' father was named after a man in Ayaito who Cathrine(their grandmother) met when she was pregnant, I want to hint that most likely he is named after his father. Rosenites don't tend to keep their mates as most men have a hard time dealing with them.

I've always made sure to connect everything together. A good story always has that in the end. A really good person to watch is Daniel (Century) he takes years foreshadowing things before bringing everything to a close. I enjoy reading his writing.

One thing that I would watch out for is that I constantly was writing new short stories for the Rosenites and my creative writing teacher scolded me for making things so sad. Don't listen to people like that. I think that tragedy as long as its not cliche is wonderful.

The story I happened to write is one that I will eventually put up on the site as a fairytale from the Rosenites. It is about a mother who lost one of her twins to a lake spirit. The other one I wrote is called the Valley of Sleeping Lillies. A curse was placed onto a valley who made an entity angry and all the people there fell into a deep sleep. The curse spread by white lillies. Think of the poppies from Wizard of Oz.

Try not to worry about word count. I personally never look at it unless I have to hit something to get an item. Stressing over word count makes your writing seem very fluffed. A thread can move quite well on just 200 words. When I'm not lazy I write super well and I always love when I find myself writing like this Calanthe's last post. It's not that I don't think you guys are worth my wordsmithing but I just can't bring myself to overly fluff things when people have constantly complained about my wordy birdyness.

Mind you when I was 14 I was the only one in a class of 30 who understood what the teacher meant when she said add on to this story. She gave us a paragraph and told us to use imagery. I turned it into 3 pages. I think  it was about a castle with a wooden bridge that had a moat around it. I think that was the year I joined an rp site and began to write as Angela.

I actually did a piece where I changed everyone's names and the desert and did something different called "Hourglass" oddly enough :P This was how I started it.

"Three years had gone by since that day. Dried blood clung to her crispy flesh. Thankful for her cloak Claudia clung to it to protect her from the sun's death curse. Death had a funny way of repeating itself. Death seemed to want to plague the young vampire. Her reddened eyes stared at a piece of grass for the first time in a while. The Arilli desert was an unforgiving mistress. Three months it had taken her. Three months to survive and live in the damn heat and dryness of the desert. Now after all this trouble she had finally seen real life. It was only a piece of grass. One single blade that symbolized freedom to come for her. After all her suffering and misery here was the one sign Claudia had been waiting for. "

Another thing that limits my writing and why I have to depend on so much research is I have dystopia. 

It largely stems from my mother keeping me home except for school. My friends that are on the site can tell you they didn't even know I existed outside of school until I was 16. 

The outside world can make me cry (and I try so hard not to until it hurts that I'm not). I get so overwhelmed but I love being outdoors. However, I like being by myself outdoors but I also can't stand being by myself. It's nearly impossible for me to even be remotely okay with me being with strangers. I think the first time I stayed with Brandon I nearly cried myself to sleep even though I was happy being there.

Both my sister and I developed Dystopia because of my mother but she was only trying to keep us safe from family and strangers. Because of the experiences my mother had I'm able to not exactly hate her for why I am this way. Hell if my family betrayed me like they did her I would do the same thing.

Our life experiences shape our writing as well unfortunately because I haven't experienced a lot I'm stuck with researching. I also have adjustment disorder. When we started Rev I was nearly in tears that it was something new and I didn't know how to handle that. I also don't know how to handle criticism very well which effects my writing. 

What I know is farm life and plants. I know school. I know the betrayal of my husband and what being heartbroken is like. I don't know what its like having someone die on me. I know what its like to have a family member dying because my step gram just got diagnosed with liver cancer but to actually not have her? I don't know that. I know how displaced I've felt  since my mother moved cross country to Alaska which has left me a mess since I don't know how to deal with life without her.

I don't feel sorry for myself and I don't expect pity. Instead I channel it into my writing. I give everything I've always wanted to my characters. I make them everything I'm not which hard. How do you write something you don't know? Research and trying to understand. Because of how long I've been at this I've developed great empathy and sympathy for people which sometimes is taken the wrong way.

Take your life experiences and turn them into something beautiful no matter how ugly they are. I've always wanted a family who was supportive of me and encouraged me to go that extra mile. Granted my intermediate family has always supported me even now when I struggle with mental illness but its the extended family that's given me damage. Always telling me how pathetic I am. I'm the bastard child that ruined lives. I'm the child that won't go far. Granted my mother punched people for those comments but I've used it all in my writing. I know what evil looks like.

Take time to ask your family about their experiences and use them. Mom was molested so I asked about it and while it hurts for her to talk about it she told me. I asked her about my biological father and why he left me, I was a girl. I asked why my extended family hates me as much as they do, my adhd. 

All these things I use in my writing. I don't expect pity I channel everything. Does it help me cope? Maybe in some sense but nothings ever really helped. I've known about everything since I was little. I ask a lot of questions. I've always known I wasn't really my father's biological child, my mother made sure never to hide that from me. I put all of my mom's good qualities into Angela. Does Angela have flaws? Yeah but mostly they are *my* flaws not my mother's. My mother in all of her greatness is everything I strive to be. Do I want to repeat her mistakes no but I have my own flaws. Angela is a mixture of all that.

Angela is a healer because of my childhood doctor who did everything in his power to help me. He understood everything and knew everything. Up until the day he died he boasted about how great I was despite how everyone else was about me. Hell at one point he called the school to tell them to f**k off for not taking care of the kids that were bullying me.

I actually went and highlighted all my flaws on this common flaw chart thingy that this writing page put up on facebook. character flaws

Take time to sort everything out and reflect on it in your writing :) I find it helps a lot. -sorry for the long posts- xD

I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia looking stuff up. How is a thing made (process and materials), what things would my character find in a given place, how do medieval people do things? If my character is supposed to know about a subject, I make sure that I know about it, too… but also, my character's knowledge is limited to what people knew in the medieval period. This is especially true relating to healing and medicine. I'm not gonna use any dung poultices or bleed someone (which are actively harmful), but things like aromatherapy were done to treat, for example, plague. I know it's useless, but my character would see that mentioned in an authoritative text on the subject, and thus would absolutely try it.

I've also been spending a lot more time on YouTube watching videos about sword and shield techniques. I find Skallagrim, Schola Gladiatoria, and Lindybeige, though of course some videos on each channel are better than others (and I generally skip over Lindybeige when he goes on a rant about women in combat, obviously). I like to think my writing of combat has improved a lot since I started looking into how weapons were actually used. If nothing else, it has helped me with drawing weapon and shield icons and writing descriptions for them.

Alot of things mentioned already I already do; especially making usages of online thesauruses so that my writing doesn't sound too repetitive. That and I browser a lot on the Wiki more than I should at various myths, creatures and gods. Especially for names lol.

Now to add some stuff to this:

Explore the unknown- For example, are you the type of writer that is known to rp a certain way, like tending to make characters that are around the same spectrum of alignment? Or just sticking to a certain race? Or gender? Well, it might be worth diving out of your comfort zone and experiment with different things. When I had originally wrote as Nemesis from Daeluin, he was just suppose to be another alt character that I would likely pick up every once in a while. Before him, I did Krystopher and his family, all lycans and ranging between chaotic neutral and lawfully evil. He himself was to be a vampire that came to served the Goddess of Deceit at that time, and wads borderline obsessed with her. From the early times onward, I noticed that I was more creative with my writing with him, both the quantity and quality of my posts were improving and I was overall enjoying him more so than any of my other characters. Soon, I developed an ever evolving story with him, explaining why he was the way he was, etc. Before I knew it, he essentially became the head of one of the most powerful families on the site. Sure, there are some chances that the experiments may flop, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Quality over quantity (there is a but in this however…)- Always, it is much better to produce short but meaningful posts over that of a towering wall of nonsense. That being said, you do at least want to make sure that you are giving something back to the other writers, or else you may put them off. I am one of those that do big word counts with ease; from the beginning, I went from 300-400 words to now easily doing 500-700+, but I also make sure that the quality is good and well thought out. I hate trying to write a post with a very small word count, and I am especially put off from doing a thread when I am to reply to such a post. There is a balance between the two, and when you where you are comfortable with both, then you are set.

Bouncing ideas- Getting ideas from your friends and other writers is an excellent way to get the brainstorming a-working. Helped me out a bunch of times when I felt like my brain was jelly.

My approach to writing: As of now, I have a strange approach to doing my replies. First, I work backwards, basically wanting to see what the end of my post would be in response to what's been done already in the ones done by the other writers. From there, I typically go ahead and write out responses and reactions of my characters towards what's been said already, while throwing in some other actions and such. And then I write out the rising action, climax and falling action in good detail.

The biggest problem I usually face these days is writer's block. What I found to work is to write. Get something down on the paper, no matter how much you don't feel like writing because in the end, you'll be getting something down and that could help to motivate you further on.