Remembering Sandra Seamans
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Well, I'm Here
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.
7 comments:
I don't know why I wasn't in on that challenge at the time. I certainly was reading a short story a day. I did read Sandra's collection in Florida, in February of 2014.
I talked about the William McGivern collection last week, and I'm nearly done with it. Several of the early stories seem to date from the WWII period, if he had started writing then. A lot are pretty silly pulp stuff, but fun.
I think I mentioned Sheila Schwartz, and I will finish her book tomorrow. It's pretty dark in a lot of ways. I think you'd probably enjoy it more than I did, Patti. It is IMAGINE A GREAT WHITE LIGHT.
Not sure what I will read next, as far as short stories go, but I just got a big Fredric Brown collection of mystery and science fiction novels and short stories on the Kindle, and though I've probably read most of them I will read them again.
It sometimes amazes me how many kind, generous, talented, and scarily smart people there are in our little corner of the universe. It really shouldn't surprise me, but sometimes it does. She has been gone for six and a half years, yet she remains with us. That, I guess, is the next best thing to still having her here.
I am so glad she found her voice as a writer and blogger before she left us.
She will be much missed, Patti - much missed. This is a fine tribute to her, and it's good to see you blogging, too.
I am glad you included this remembrance of Sandra Seamans. I checked out her blog and I searched through your blog for other mentions of her and I found some references to some of her stories on line, so I will check them out. She was very dedicated to spreading the word about short stories and where to publish them.
She really was. Without ego even.
Thanks for this. I'm kind of late for another memorial, but it should be mentioned--John Varley, another writer who wrote better short fiction than novels, died yesterday. (So did former NY REVIEW OF SF editor Arthur Hlavaty.) A tough day.
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