In 2022 I had two short stories and one article published, and put out a tabletop game supplement.
Archive of the Odd Issue 2: A Supernatural History published my story Birdwatching Notebook Found on A Colorado Trailhead. The story is told in the form of a birdwatching notebook, as a birdwatcher finds that they are the one being watched. All the stories in Archive of the Odd are written in the style of found documents – its a really fun collection, packed with horror.
My short story Two Condition Reports from The Museum of Mythologic Science and Paranatural History was published at Hexagon in Issue 8, Spring 2022. In it, a disaster at a museum is told via condition reports detailing damage to various specimens and objects in the collection. This story has been my most popular and well reviewed story to date. Kathleen Jennings analyzed the story using her three-mood story structure, Charles Payseur reviewed the story in his larger review of Issue 8, and Tor.com listed “Two Condition Reports” as one of the Must Read speculative Short fiction stories for March 2022.
The Nachtkalb of Colmar is an article about the Alsatian apparition of the Nachtkalb – a ghostly calf that appears in villages throughout the region. The article surveys the different appearances and powers displayed by various village Nachtkalb’s, as well as discusses the folklore of the village animal or beast. I read and translated sources in French and German for the piece, and am quite proud of it. I always want to make Alsatian folklore and history more accessible for English-language readers, and felt this was a good foray. You can read the article in The Quarter(ly) – Vol. II: Myths, Fables, and Folklore.
Lastly, I put out the Museum Conservation Report as part of the Artifacts of Horror Jam. (It was a big year for museum-related pieces for me.) The jam was to make different artifacts that would be used in a tabletop game as clues to the creeping horror present in a seaside town. You can download the Museum Conservation Report on my itch.io page, as well as check out other entries in the jam. Museum Conservation Report is also available under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, meaning it is available for use in other projects.
2023 will be my tenth year of submitting stories, and I am hopeful that I will hit some of my dream magazines this year, and that some of my most cherished work will find homes. I hope you enjoyed my work last year, and that you will continue to read my stories in 2023. Happy reading!
Gabrielle Bleu 