Remembering Sandra Seamans
Okay, so I've finally surrendered to the world of blogs. Welcome to my
little corner of the world, pull up a chair, get comfortable, and let's
see if we can find something to talk about.
And Sandra Seamans indeed found a lot of things to talk about. I doubt
there was ever a blog that celebrated short story writing as well and a
fully as MY LITTLE CORNER. Nor one that served a community as thoroughly
and as selflessly as hers. She found her niche surprisingly quickly and
although she claimed she mostly started a blog so she could participate
in flash fiction challenges (remember those) it required hours of work
for Sandra to pull up the information she did so willingly.
And it was also clear that she read many blogs herself and there were a lot of them back in 2008.
If you go through the ten plus years of entries, you will see names come
and go, zines come and go, contests come and go. And nobody was a
bigger champion of other people's success than Sandra. Her "little
Snoopy Dance" was always joyous. If someone wanted to a history of the
online crime short story community over the last twenty years, her blog
would be the place to start. A place to collect every contest, every
call for submissions, the writers, the ups and downs of the business,
and on and on.
In 2015, in the course of a week, Sandra lost her husband and mother and
a lot of the joy went out of her. Although she came back to blogging,
it was not about writing short stories so much as continuing her service
to her fellow short story writers. How brave.
I only ever knew Sandra online but somehow it seemed like I knew her
pretty well. She was candid on her blog. And we shared a year of reading
short stories. Brian Lindenmuth suggested the challenge and initially
there were quite a few participants, but by the end it was mostly
Sandra, Brian and me. (Why wasn't Jeff in on this?)
Reading a short story every day doesn't seem like an onerous task but
the mere chore of finding 365 stories you are willing to read was harder
than we thought. Anyway, through her blog and through flash fiction
challenges and through this assignment, I felt like I knew Sandra well.
Here are a few words from short story great, Art Taylor.
"In my writing courses at George Mason University and in any workshop I
led elsewhere, I regularly devoted a section of my PowerPoint to
resources for writers trying to market their short fiction. At the top
of the first slide was My Little Corner, and
I felt like I could never say enough about Sandra’s expertise on short
story markets, her dedication to staying on top of market news, and her
advocacy always on behalf of the authors, finding opportunities for us
and warning us about venues to avoid. I never
met Sandra in person, sadly, but she and I chatted sometimes, mostly in
the comments section of My Little Corner. When she included something
about me in her posts, she called me a “friend of the blog,” but in our
own way in this age of online interactions,
I felt like she and I were actual friends. I’m sorry I missed the chance
to let her know how very much I appreciated her and her work."
An interview from 2012 on DO SOME DAMAGE.
Some words from Paul Brazill
Sandra on PULP CURRY
Here are some words from Kate Laity
And from Sandra Ruttan
Sandra's collection of stories COLD RIFTS is out of print, but it won't
take much effort to find many of her stories online. A particular
favorite of mine was one she wrote for a flash fiction challenge I ran a
long time ago. The challenge was to write a story that uses the song
"SWEET DREAMS." Hers was clever and beautifully rendered. Google "Repeat
Offenders" if you care to sample it. It's just a thousand words after
all. Just a short story. But for Sandra and a few others, a good short
story is the gold standard of writing.
Goodbye, Sandra. We will miss you.
George Kelley
TracyK
Jerry House
Then
he learns about his assignment. This is a very '60s novel, with the
commies stirring up "the Coloured elements" and doing a bang-up job of
it. Shaw's sent to Harlem, where a woman falls for him at once and gets
involved in some really serious action that even includes a tiger. In
an apartment. Things get even more bizarre later on. (Spy novel plots
got more and more outrageous as the years went on for writers not
following the Le Carre model.) It's kind of hard to get past the racial
elements of the plot here. It might have been good fun in 1966, but
it's not so much now. Still, McCutchan had a flair for this kind of
thing, and the book zips right along. 
