Thank you! What a beautiful compliment. :)

There are a lot more voices competing to be heard today, for sure, though there's also more room to be - whereas in the past, there were a very limited few "big" names in every creative industry, there's now all sorts of nooks and crannies for smaller voices to blossom. Lucky us, huh.

Instead of writing from the heart I was trying to anticipate what people wanted to read and that sent me down some dead-end paths.

I've noticed the same thing! Can't think of a worse thing for creativity tbh, I'm glad you got out of that :) It's a very volatile line of work, isn't it. In other jobs, it's sort of set - I offer X amount/quality of work and you pay me Y, but with creative endeavors it's ever-changing and can be quite anxiety-inducing. Demons indeed.