So for a very long time now, I had an idea for an extremely extensive Sailor Moon work, spanning at least every single arc. I had a trillion ideas that I worked through in my head, but it was just a back burner pet project. So I finally decided I should sit down and start writing out outlines for characters, arcs and my changes. I even figured out ways I could work in whole new arcs, and even started working on those. Then I began a timeline of events.
It was when my timeline reached page 30 and I wasn’t even a tenth of the way done that it came to me; this wasn’t just off the rails, it had jumped from and then off multiple sets and was now running across the ocean floor, well on its way to Europe. I had completely lost sight of this being a fanfic and it was becoming an original work sometimes featuring plot elements, vaguely, from an old magical girl series.
Am I alone in this? If not, did you just make it into an original work?