So, I’ve been writing a 175k word One Piece fanfic for about 6 months. Most of my writing is done on a 10 year-old laptop I dug out of the closet while I wait for my kid to finish sports practice. Today, the hard-drive died. (Thankfully I have a cloud backup.)
Now, without a laptop, I have nothing to continue working on. I can’t afford a new laptop. Just glad I didn’t lose all my work.
I always found fanfic easier to write because someone else did huge amounts of world building for me! I don’t have to describe say, Luffy’s powers because the person reading it ideally watched or read One Piece and knows stuff! Same with prestablished relationships.
175k is still insane! Best I did was 50k for nanowrimo like a decade ago for the Garrett Investigates fandom.
That’s part of the reason I wrote mine with mostly original or remixed characters, so I could explore things Oda didn’t while still playing in his world. There’s a tremendous freedom and responsibility in fanfiction if you’re trying to honor the original. If not for my kid acting as a sounding board, I would have quit long ago.