I think you’ve obviously thought about this enough that you’ve got most of the landscape mapped. I’ll simply add four brief thoughts.
First on deck is something probably similar to what you’ve heard before, which is that most creative types don’t flourish by thinking about the audience. I say most, because there are always exceptions. But write for you isn’t a call to intellectual masturbation. It’s a warning against attempting to please everyone (a goal you as a rational person know is patently impossible) or even some shifting idealized target self. I imagine there are precious few critically or commercially successful authors who write things they themselves would not, save being their own harshest critics, enjoy reading were it to come from someone else. It boils down to sincerity. A mercenary’s motive is the opposite of innovation. Innovation can and more often than not will fail. It’s a risk. Luckily it’s a risk that costs only time, and maybe you learn something from the failure, which is a pretty decent consolation prize.
Secondly, perfection is receding horizon. At the risk of being That Pedant, the Latin root basically translates into after-the-fact, meaning no more improvement is possible, it’s totally done. But there’s done and then there’s done. Some artists have to give themselves closure and move on from something, or it drags them back from exploring new ideas. Others are never ever finished until they’re dead, and keep on tweaking to the grave. If you can’t stop obsessing over what you’re working on, then maybe you’re among the former. If not, don’t feel you need to close the book on something just because people tell you that’s the only way forward, or even just because you released it into the wild.
Thirdly, yeah, most ideas are built on others. Cory presents pretty nifty ideas, but he’s maybe less original than you think. He’s steeped in the history of his genre, knowledgeable of the wider literature and isn’t afraid to draw inspiration from other artists and the wider world. Nothing is completely new. It can’t be, it’s not born in a casual vacuum. The whole freaking universe started as a single dense symmetric point. Everything is a new take on the old. This is pretty much what’s meant by the expression nothing new under the sun.
Finally one little bit of advice someone once offer me. Possibly you’ve heard it before. I’ve not done workshops or interacted with other writers, so maybe I’m the thousandth person to tell you this. But it’s what got me going at the one point in my life when I couldn’t think what to write. Just take a character and do anything at all with him, her or it. Roll some dice if you have to. Just start them moving. Sure odds are most of what they do you’ll want to scrap later on, but that’s how all discovery works, in art or science.
Hope that helps, if not, no worries. Best of luck.
