Fanfiction Confusion

I don't normally discuss fanfiction outside the forums on the site, simply because I think I obsess about it enough normally that I don't need to obsess anymore on my blog, but today, its not about my obsession, its more about what I want to do with writing.

When I first discovered fanfiction last year, it felt like there was this whole new world of people and stories out there. It was new, refreshing, different. In the beginning, I was just reading and I thought: I want to be like these fanfiction authors, I want to get reviews, I want to write a great story. So I finally got an idea and the guts to write my first chapter and I sent it in at the end of August. It was my first submission, I felt that if it got validated, I would be happy. It got validated, I felt that if I got hits, I would be happy. I got thirty hits on the first day, which I felt was alright, it was my first chapter with only about 800 words and no banner. Then I wanted reviews, I got two reviews in the first week. It felt good to answer them, then I saw other authors with stories in the same category with fifty reviews per chapter. I wanted to be like that. Suddenly, two reviews and thirty hits felt like nothing. I felt like such a loser compared to these writers with seven stories already written and this one with 2000 words per chapter.

So I finished my first story and started writing my second and eventually a one-shot before my third. I have to admit that reviews are very important and they help me update faster simply because I would feel bad if I left my readers hanging too long. And after answering a dozen lovely reviews, I feel good about myself. But I always feel that there's a bit of pressure. I always feel slightly afraid whenever I send in a new chapter that it won't measure up to the ones before or nobody will read the next chapter. I mean, it feels great that people are telling me this is the best _____ fic they have ever read, but then when I work on the next chapter, I would think: would they be disappointed? Or sometimes, I would be reading another author's story and I would feel that my writing would never be as good as theirs. Sometimes I don't know if fanfiction is good for me or bad for me.

Sometimes, I feel like there are a lot of boundaries when it comes to fanfiction. There's the whole OOC thing, like I have to write a character in a certain way and it always feels like I'm borrowing the story from someone, it always feels like the story is never completely mine because I wasn't the one that invented Harry Potter. I think I'm starting to see the dangers of writing fanfiction. When I first started and I read an editorial on Mugglenet talking about the bad side of fanfiction, I totally disagreed. But now I can kind of see the writer's points. I feel like I can't create original characters or write stories that are not taking place in the HP world because I'm so used to it. I feel almost like every story has to take place in Hogwarts. I'm even used to the format, the layout of the chapters where I press enter twice instead of indenting my paragraphs.

I want to be an author someday and publish books, fanfiction is a wonderful place to practice, but I wonder if the practice is worth it if it means it will be affecting the skill to create characters, settings, and original plotlines.