Just keep writing.
I do have some disagreement with the dismissal of philosophy pre-Rand as with David Hume without a discussion of exactly how, in the philosophical climate at the time, that the thinking should be discarded with a bit of hand waving on a keyboard.
My favorite little survey of philosophy is Mathew Stewart's 'The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy', where he asks: "What does mysticism have to do with philosophy?" ... "Good question. The belief in unbelievable things, whether ghosts or cosmic minds, is incompatible with our most basic understanding of philosophy. Philosophy is the love of knowledge, not superstition. I contend, however, that much of what passes for philosophy is in fact mysticism. Mysticism, in my view, is based on an abstraction from our ordinary, healthy way of knowing things. It is a natural dysfunction of our cognitive apparatus. Philosophy, when understood as something other than a general and favorable disposition toward knowledge, that is, when viewed as a specific project and the source of a privileged sort of knowledge, is just this sort of mysticism."

The ideals of Rand, such as 'man's life qua man' references an ideal man which has to be created, preferably rationally with no error, by a brain. There is only one direct experience of a possible ideal that a person can experience directly and possibly form an experiencable ideal, one's own consciousness. The ideal 'qua man' is not the Platonic kind in some supernatural domain, but rather one that has to be created as a concept and does not exist until created in a mind. Rand had her 'qua man' which does not necessarily match with any other person's ideal man.

I deal with a brother who is extremely dyslectic and another man whom over the years I helped with computer hardware problems. I also have a minor form of dyslexia which causes my very slow reading speed. My eyes flick around and sometimes take nearby parts of words make them part of the words that I am reading and make what I read seem to be meaningless, requiring the rereading of some sentences over and over until I finally find out what my brain created wrongly. Since both guys had to memorize everything to get through school, they both complain that I don't remember everything that they ever said to me. Another problem seems to be that they do not pronounce words nearly correctly enough to relate to how words as they read them seem to be pronounced.
Both of them, long ago, read Atlas Shrugged, not paying attention to Galt's speech and got the idea that it was a story about a group of people who thought they were better than everyone else and will not discuss the book with me. My brother is an atheist like I am so any atheistic aspect of the philosophy probably did not bother him. The other guy is at present very religious, believing that one time at a lunch counter, two demons sat down next to him and later in life that God had caused him to end up face down in his driveway with a severe heart attack as punishment for his use of alcohol and other drugs. No idea that just natural processes were involved.