I certainly agree with what you've said here. Writing can be about a lot of things, but the best stories are the ones where the authors really got into it and put their all behind every pen stroke. Not to please others, but because they love writing and want to share their best work with the world and improve with every piece.

If you write "for the market" in an attempt to cash in on trends and popular genres of the time, you may get more sales, but you will eventually be forgotten, a flash in the pan among hundreds of thousands of other writers who tried the same thing you did.

But if you differentiate yourself and carve out your own niche, if you put your passion on display for the world to see, I firmly believe that the others that share part of your vision will be drawn to this.

Even if your vision is as absurdly specific as "Clown spiders take over the planet Venus in order to start a fast food chain that runs on the methane in its atmosphere", there are bound to be those who are drawn to your vision, even if your specific demographic is very small.

Thanks for posting this, it certainly helped remind me why I started writing in the first place.