But I feel honor-bound to point out that you live in one of the most beautiful and, from the point of view of much of the world, exotic places in the Northern Hemisphere, filled with some of the world’s most beautiful and exotic creatures, and you spend your spare time looking at it / them very, very, very closely. We all tend to discount our advantages — but there’s got to be something you can work with, there.

So many people say “write what you know,” but as you say, “I think the reason many new writers work fall flat for me is because the only thing they are immersing themselves in is writing and SF/F.”

How many people are interested in reading about juggling? I’ve no idea. But I’m in a privileged position here! I can take the most interesting characters and events and places and people and sights and smells and feelings from a decade of my life and share them. Fictionalized, of course, but the richness, as you say, is something I wanted to get.

Other elements I hope will be rich:
– one character’s back story is similar to my father’s, so I’ll be taking stories he told me of his days in the army. Again, not the actual stories, but the feel of them. The richness.
– the same character also gets involved with religion. My own upbringing in a fundamentalist christian family should help with this aspect.

As I said, your post provides exactly the confidence boost about these creative/worldbuilding decisions that I need right now.

PS (after reading the above comment): I travel a lot, but never really think about incorporating those places into my work as locations. I should!

And we see that a lot in people who get to travel to strange new places, in people who have exciting lives, and experiences of which we are envious. But I don’t think passion and curiosity, and imaginations are functions of the privlidge to travel, or the good fortune to live in exciting times. Indeed traveling and exiciting times are sometimes very much a product of having that kind of imagination, rather than the other way around.

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The other thing, that I think happens is that we see richness and literary merit in other people’s work and don’t really see that sort of thing in our own work, but I think a big part of this is that literary merit is something that gets determined by other people. Richness is something that we see when another writer gives us a glimpse into their heads. We don’t get to determine the literary merit of our own work, and we’re already in our own heads…