I've been thinking a lot lately about writing, what I want to do with this little hobby going forward, and whether to take it beyond writing fanfiction. As of this post, I have been struggling with motivation for a few weeks to various factors.
Sleep has been the biggest one—I am someone who has always struggled with it, from switching sleep patterns, insomnia, and currently where I live, it's always daylight which makes it harder to regulate. If I'm rested, I'm motivated, if I'm not, I feel like I am going through the day in zombie mode.

Another factor is that while I love writing fanfiction for Fairy Tail, it's becoming more and more apparent that this fandom growing quieter every year. When I sit down to work on Timelines, I am constantly questioning if what I'm writing is any good before then asking myself who would want to read this. I know that I'm enjoying the process, but there's this new element to writing that has me questioning everything I'm typing.

I think it's also partially to the third and probably most damning factor, which is that you know you're competing with AI on some degree.
One of the motivational factors for me was always, 'I want to improve this aspect of my writing' and then perhaps one day, I could consider myself decent enough to write a novel. Knowing that you're writing to compete against stuff that's generated quickly, with no heart put into it, all to try and make some easy money, is disheartening.
My only hope is that human-written works will stand out against AI-written works, as most of it reads the same, uses the same style, formatting, as well as having a few other noticable quirks. For me personally, there's some irony in all of this. For my university dissertation, I wrote about AI when it was still just a neural network, a baby essentially, never thinking that this is what it would be used for.

I don't know what conclusion I'll come to. I'm enjoying writing my sequel and trying to improve on aspects of my writing that I noticed in Bloodlines could be better, but a part of me is considering literally writing and finishing it all for myself and not posting the rest of it. That way, I can avoid the sting of disappointment but still work on improving my writing. Then maybe I'll feel ready to attempt an original work, and hope that it can stand out.