Reddit mentions of The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril: A Novel

I'm almost in my 60s, and I rather expect I'd get along with your mom. I'd be happy to help her drive you nuts! :-) (And then I'd show her how to fix her mobile phone, because yeah I am indeed tech savvy.)

I figure that I might as well be optimistic. It's a far more cheerful way to live my life. And besides, nothing new and innovative was created by a pessimist.

Hubbard actually did have quite a bit of attention on aesthetics and art; at one point there was a quite-nice collection of his writings on the subject. The subject is one I care about quite a bit myself, especially if you expand the navel-gazing to the subject of creativity in general.

But I'm not sure that I could get into LRH's head enough to envision what he consciously considered about the role of art in his own life. He was a productive writer, but a penny-a-word guy who never did make it into the "slicks" (the better-paying magazines) the way his friend Heinlein did, and his practice was to write page-turning yarns very quickly. I actually think that affected tech decisions he made, because he truly needed someone to look over his shoulder (as fiction editor or speaker-of-uncomfortable-truths-to-the-CEO) and tell him when he was screwing up and how to fix things.

If you want to be entertained by a fictional portrayal of Hubbard as a young man, I recommend The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, in which LRH appears as a minor character... but, I think, a reasonably-accurately-drawn one. It's good ol' pulp fun, so you might like it even without that excuse.