My Favorite Things with Linnea Hartsuyker

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with author Linnea Hartsuyker, whose latest book, The Sea Queen, comes out August 14th (psst, that’s tomorrow!) from HarperCollins!

What does Linnea love when she’s not working on her latest book? Spoiler alert: a comic that barely resembles the television show that adapts it, books that are old friends, a different kind of workplace comedy, and a television show that you should absolutely not spoil for yourself. Curious? Read on to learn more!

I’ve always been fannish — obsessing about my favorite pieces of media, inserting myself into their worlds, and imagining backstories and other scenarios for their characters. My fannish obsessions have tended to be intense, but time-limited, like love affairs that eventually run their course. I have other pieces of media in my life, though, that are more like friends I always enjoy visiting. These are some of those.

Comics: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series is a long-time favorite of mine, and it is a masterpiece; however, I also want to highlight Mike Carey’s Lucifer graphic novels. I’ve never seen the TV series, but from what I understand, it’s very different from the comics. The Lucifer of Mike Carey’s books would never be interested enough in human concerns to solve crimes. No, his striving is on a cosmic scale, but even with vast power and vision, he engages in a very human struggle, asking how can someone truly be their own person, while also having parents, a background, and an environment that created them? For Lucifer, this plays out on a vast stage, visiting the mythological lands of not one but two creations, but in the end, the answer is universal — no one can escape the facts of their own creation.

The Sandman series is, as it should be, a collection of stories, of stories about stories. Many different artists contributed to it, and it takes digressions that flesh out its world, until the last third of the series where it comes together to tell one final story. Lucifer, too, has a structure that echoes its main character, and more unified visuals. Its subplots meander much less, instead driving relentlessly toward the final confrontation. Though Lucifer spun off from Sandman, it stands on its own as a remarkable work of literature.

Books: I love books from all genres, and it’s very hard to pick only a few. These are not necessarily the most life-changing of the books I’ve ever read, but they are some of my oldest friends.

I first picked up Tam Lin by Pamela Dean because of its gorgeous Thomas Canty cover art, and was quickly immersed in this 20th century retelling of the ballad of Tam Lin. This version’s Janet is a freshman at Blackstock College, the daughter of an English professor, also majoring in English. As a bookish high school student who longed to meet people who loved literature as much as I did, Tam Lin was a perfect fantasy for me as high school student. Though it is a book of speculative fiction, bringing in the uncanny at a leisurely pace, interspersed with Shakespeare plays and term papers, what I love most about it is the group of friends surrounding Janet, friends who are a world unto themselves. My own college experience, majoring in Engineering rather than writing, was nothing like Janet’s, but I still read it now for the comfort that spending time with these bookish college students gives me.

There may be no more perfect writer for an imaginative teen girl than Mercedes Lackey. From presenting the first gay protagonists I ever encountered in a positive, anti-homophobic light, to her delightful series about elves who race sports cars, Mercedes Lackey was another great escape for me in my teen years. The books of hers that I’ve returned to most often are her Diana Tregarde trilogy, about psychic Guardian Diana Tregarde, who protects the innocent from dangerous magic. These books came well before the current boom in urban fantasy, and may have created the template for hundreds of magical women who use their powers for good and date vampires. Diana is a wonderfully no-nonsense protagonist, self-sacrificing without being a martyr, and with a warm good humor that makes me glad I can visit her in novels whenever I want.

Television: I volunteered in a theater during some of my summers in high school, setting up lighting, managing props, costuming and dressing actors, and being a backstage gopher, so the Canadian series Slings and Arrows, which takes the viewer behind the scenes of a Shakespeare company, was a wonderful find — and is now streaming for free on YouTube. In season one we meet our somewhat unhinged director-protagonist (Paul Gross), who is haunted by the ghost of his former best friend, now enemy. Every over-the-top personality I’d ever met in the theater is represented in Slings and Arrows, and the conflicts range from artistic differences to affairs of the heart. And since I spent much of my twenties as a web developer in advertising, I also loved when season two amped up the workplace comedy and introduced a fantastical ad agency, only slightly more demented than the ones I had encountered in the real world.

Slings and Arrows lets us behind a literal curtain, while The Good Place, like Sandman and Lucifer, takes us behind the curtains of the cosmos. The Good Place is a bit newer, so it remains to be seen if I will come back to it over and over, but it’s too wonderful not to include here. I am not generally a spoilerphobe, but the less known about The Good Place before watching it, the better — all I will say is that Kristen Bell plays a young woman who was a bit of a dirtbag during her life, and who ends up in an afterlife where she does not belong. From there, the show creates a fantastic and fantastical world and cosmology, asks tough questions about life and morality, and does it in hilarious, snappy 23-minute episodes.

Linnea Hartsuyker can trace her ancestry back to Harald Fairhair, the first king of Norway, and a major character in The Half-Drowned King and The Sea Queen. She grew up in the middle of the woods outside Ithaca, New York, and studied Engineering at Cornell University. After a decade of working at internet startups, and writing in her spare time, she attended NYU and received an MFA in Creative Writing. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband.

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