Writing Fanfiction to Practice Writing

Anyone else write fanfiction?

I recently decided to get back into writing, and wanted to do something low stakes. I really only wrote technical documents, design or worldbuilding docs, and like 500 words of an original story that never went anywhere. I finished a short fanfic story (not lewd) the other day, and was able to keep a 1k words a day pace. Been a good chance to learn about how I write, and I'm starting to see where I have a lot to work on. Maybe it is the fact I like the original work a lot that it motivated me to actually complete it, but I do feel like I'm improving at how much I can write in a day. Unrelated, but org roam in Emacs has been a pretty good ecosystem to write in. I am a vim-strag so I have to use evil mode, but I like the built-in tooling and the nodes system that roam has.

Not having to worry about describing certain relationships or settings is nice. Especially when you aren't writing a whole series out of it, just a short scenario. Also, I definitely pulled punches on how I wrote the scenario because I want the characters to end up in a good place. If I had written something original, I'd have probably let my cynicism take over. It's a good opportunity if you just want to practice getting words on a page, especially if you are like me and can't even start writing because your worldbuilding or something is not absolutely perfect.

Bad part is you can't really share that shit with anyone you know to get feedback. I'm going to post it on AO3 at some point, once I do some edits.

Also, I've been reading a shit ton of fanfic for this fandom as a consequence. That shit is a rabbit-hole. It's all just pure slop, but there have been some gems here and there. I really had the impression that most fanfics were just excuses for smut, obviously that's a lot of it, but I was actually surprised how much were just pure romance. Female-dominated fandoms probably have way more lewd writing than the male spaces.