What Is This?
My name is Josh Berthume. I’m a writer. Sometimes people pay me to do it and sometimes they don’t. This is an example of the latter.
Short Stories, Long Odds is a project I’ve been thinking of taking on for a while. Essentially it is my first stab at writing a book that isn’t some outgrowth of academic research. My research is about terrorism anyways, and that can get pretty depressing.
Instead, what I’m presenting here is a collection of essays on politics, society, culture, art, entertainment, and criticism of all five. Everything you read here is true, although names have been changed in the instance where a character was far too real to leave out.
The idea is to write one story a week for a year write some stories, enough to compile into a treatment, so probably 20. Once we’re done with that, we’ll talk about what we’re planning on doing with them all. The blog will be commentary on that process and other things, and the stories will be indexed by week, available in various ways from around the site. Anything that is in the category “Short Stories, Long Odds” is part of the book. You can see the last five entries under the “Non-Fiction, For Real” sidebar header and view every entry in the category here.
I’m also going to be including some pictures I’ve taken, as sometimes the story can be introduced or annotated with the photo, or vice versa.
It is my sincere hope that you enjoy this. I haven’t always enjoyed these things as they’ve happened to me, but I’ve enjoyed writing about them.