I drew that as a kid. The date at the bottom says November 3, 1999, so I would have been fourteen. I liked Zelda, if you couldn’t tell.
It was a reproduction (freehand, not traced!) of this:
This was part of a phase I went through where I re-drew a lot of official Nintendo art, mostly Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64. I liked the art, but what I really loved were the games.
I think most kids, at one time or another, find worlds so captivating – so fantastical, but so real – that all they can do is revel in the magic and try to pay homage as best they can. They dress up, they write fan fiction, they draw pictures, they play make-believe. They’ve opened the portal, and all they want now is more.
I still love those games, and their magic has only dimmed a little. But the art, the homage, is different now. As an adult, I honor the works I love not by copying them, but by trying to make something else that makes me feel the same way. Sometimes I still do it with visual art, though more often now it’s with writing. But the intent is the same. Rather than enshrining someone else’s magic, I want to create my own spells.
Have you noticed a similar change in yourself as you get older?
Brian D. Buckley 
I think it’s a pretty common progression. My earliest stuff was pretty derivative, then it started going off in its own directions. The influences are still pretty obvious, but the elements are combined in ways that are not standard. For example, my main character is a very classic detective, in the Doyle/Carr/Queen/Van Dyne mode, but she’s living in a world that none of those writers would have used.
Oh, and yes, I still like my early favorites as much as ever. I’m currently re-reading one of the Skylark books by Doc Smith, and I’m enjoying the current e-book reissues of the Matt Helm novels.
As they say…copying from one artist is plagiarism, copying from many is genius. 🙂
Or, as Tarantino put it, rather pointedly, at the end of Kill Bill, the magpie deserves your respect. 🙂
The need to create a unique thing has definitely crept in: since I started writing fiction again I have frequently found myself reading a new story and thinking “That is an amazing idea, that I can no longer write.”
Fortunately, like Oscar Wilde, I sometimes write the idea anyway and discover my flesh on their bones is a creature of a very different stripe.
I hear you. Often times, merely reinterpreting an old work makes your new version unrecognizable. Besides, if it was good enough for Shakespeare…
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