Love this! You're an amazing fiction writer, which I'm sure comes through in your DMing as well. Your players must be lucky to have you.

I just finished playing a 6+ hour session yesterday! It was the finale to a campaign we started this spring. That campaign was beyond my wildest dreams. That was made possible by the DM's skills and hard work, and by the creativity and collaboration skills of all of us. Most of us are continuing on into a campaign in the same world, but with new characters. I actually kept an in-character journal (I started a few sessions in, and then I kept it up throughout the campaign) which I'm considering publishing. That's still a ways off yet, though, since I at least want to wait for some more of our commissioned art to be completed.

I've done some DMing myself and can definitely appreciate how it teaches essential life skills. I'm still in awe of people who can homebrew. I started out with published adventures and while I did write one thing myself, it was almost exclusively combat using monsters pulled from the monster manual and other published sources, because that's what I felt like I knew how to do.