This month, we’re publishing more flash, but also mixing in some longer short stories.  Look forward to some stuff from some great writers, including Joshua Citrak, G. Arthur Brown, Hassan Riaz, Tyler Gates, J. Bradley, Joshua Martin, and Chett Tiller.  We’re going to publish something each Monday and Friday this month.

We’re starting to get more stuff submitted, but we’re always looking for more.  Please check out our submissions page, especially if you write absurdist or bizarro fiction.

And please spread the word! We’re on facebook over at https://www.facebook.com/paragraphline and Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/ParagraphLine. The best way to find out about new stuff is to add one of those two and get all the updates.

Thanks!

Your editor,

Jon

Head on over and check out Gager’s “Chiller” and Konrath’s “The Locality Principle”, plus six more awesome pieces of flash.

For the month of April, we’re publishing flash twice a week: Mondays and Fridays.  On the board, we’ve got stuff from John Sheppard, Rusty Barnes, Timothy Gager, Brittany Connolly, B F Moloney, Fiona Helmsley, Justin Bostian, Garrett Cook, and yours truly.  There’s some awesome work coming out, so please stay tuned and check it out.

This month’s “publisher’s best friend” prize, an award I will hand out to the writer who does the most to make my life less of a huge pain in the ass, goes to Timothy Gager, who submitted three pieces a matter of minutes after I announced we were open.

We’re still looking for more great stuff, so please check out our submissions page and fire away.  The hope is that we’ll get to daily posts, but that will involve much more incoming stuff (and maybe someone to help me read stuff – hint, hint.)

If you haven’t already check us out over at Facebook https://www.facebook.com/paragraphline and Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/ParagraphLine.

Thanks,

Jon

While you’re waiting on the first batch of fiction to come out, I thought I’d mention some of the stuff that’s come out by Paragraph Line Books since AITPL #13.  All of this is Jon Konrath-related, but don’t worry, there will be plenty of non-Konrath fiction coming your way in 2012.

So, there are two new-new books:

Fistful of Pizza (PL-104) is a collection of nine stories by Jon Konrath.  If you’re interested in a childhood friend that turned terrorist in an Islamic militant splinter faction of Amway,  Richard Nixon’s commentary on his favorite Dokken album, or a movie review of Little Fockers, exploring the film’s BSDM-inspired pedophilia themes and parody of the Ben Hur chariot race, filmed with small breed dogs around a set designed like a 1970s Times Square filled with heroin addicts and pornographers, this book’s for you.

The Earworm Inception (PL-105) is another collection, this time with 20 pieces of flash fiction.  It includes a Texas Governor who obsessively listens to Rebecca Black right before every state execution, a chainsaw factory that plays Ozzy Osbourne for its welding robots, an ex-girlfriend drunk-dialing from Kandahar, where she’s starting a Shakey’s Pizza restaurant chain, and an endless search to find the right mix of prescription medication to stop the memories of a bizarre past.

Two older books have also been re-released; the new editions have new covers and some small edits, but are available at a lower price, and are also on the Kindle for the first time:

Rumored to Exist (PL-103) is Jon Konrath’s classic 2002 novel.  It’s a collection of 201 vignettes or flash fiction pieces, loosely tied together into a non-linear narrative about a protagonist attempting to find meaning in a bizarre near-future world. It’s a densely packed stew of ideas flashed together, morphing between dreams, emails, conversations, and action. It’s a novel in the style of Naked Lunch, written for today’s short-attention-span hypertextual world.

Summer Rain (PL-106) is Konrath’s first book, which is a creative nonfiction tale about a summer in the early 90s in a lazy midwestern college town.  It’s a coming-of-age tale that explores depression, finding your place in life, early death metal music, the early days of the internet, and slumming it on a college campus.

Anyway, check out the books, and all of the back issues of Air in the Paragraph Line you can find here.  Stay tuned, and get ready for more fiction here, starting in April.

A lot has gone down since Air in the Paragraph Line #13 came out back in 2010.  I’ve published two new books and re-released another.  The whole publishing industry has changed because of this Kindle thing.  Four Loko has been banned in New York.  Hot Tub Time Machine was released. I think a space shuttle blew up or got retired or something, but I wasn’t really paying that much attention.

I’ve been writing and sending out a lot of flash fiction, and I’ve had trouble finding really cool markets.  There are some out there, but a lot of places publishing flash fiction are doing the same boring crap that made me start AITPL in the first place, except now it’s a thousand words long.  I don’t want some story about an alcoholic college professor who has a distant wife.  I want aliens, zombies, a cult devoted to bad Nic Cage movies that perform autopsies at the Kroger deli counter while obsessively listening to Bonnie Raitt records backwards.

So, let’s get this thing started.  Here’s the deal:

• The name has changed.  I used to call the zine Air in the Paragraph Line.  This is being shortened to just Paragraph Line.  Our imprint is still called Paragraph Line Books.
• Instead of publishing a big book every year or ten, we will be moving to online publication.  That’s right, you’ll be able to come back to this very page for a new dose of your favorite writers, for free.  This will be ongoing, and for now, I’m going to do it monthly.  If I get enough stuff in, I’ll switch to weekly.
• If you still like to kill trees, do not despair.  We’re going to take the best of the best from online, add some new exclusives and other fun stuff, and keep publishing anthology versions, starting with #14.  These will be print-on-demand and will be as cheap as possible, and filled with tons of reading, just like the previous versions.  We’ll also be doing Kindle e-book versions, too.
• In addition to longer stories like we’ve published in the past, we’ll also be taking and publishing flash fiction.  That means intense bursts of story in under a thousand words, which is perfect for those of us with unmedicated and unchecked ADD.
• We now use Submittable (aka Submishmash) for submissions, so it’s easier than ever to send in stuff and keep track of it.
• In the times between new stuff, I’d like to do as much as possible to showcase writers and other publications.  That means reviews, interviews, articles, and other good reading material you can use to waste time on your iPhone in the crapper.

So, readers, stay tuned, and help spread the word.  Writers, I’m looking for stories and I’m offering a perfect opportunity for you to shamelessly self-promote your work elsewhere.  Please click on the Submissions link to check out our guidelines and send in stories, or go to About Us to read more and get in touch.

Thanks,

Jon

“One day in 1971, Ozzy and Tony Iommi took 47 hits of acid and just outside of Newark, New Jersey accidentally found the giant tablets of gold from which the Mormon religion was founded.  They decided it would be wise to melt it into a giant bong and take it on the road with them in a converted tractor-trailer.  With the aid of an early prototype of the first Apple computer, they hired several technicians and wrote a text-based video game based on the works and philosophy of John Locke, where you used the paddle controller to navigate corpuscles through a maze drawn with *’s and %’s.  However, in the course of developing the first video game, they sold all of the gold plates to fund the venture.  And after another acid bender, Ozzy had a vision of Locke arisen from the dead.  He sold his Apple computer to buy thousands of gallons of pure, artesian water for the mammoth bong that did not exist.  Ozzy went insane, and in a few years, Ronnie James Dio was trying to sing ‘Iron Man’ to clubs full of disgruntled Sabbath fans.”

-from section 99 of Rumored to Exist

Paragraph Line Books is proud to announce that Jon Konrath’s second novel Rumored to Exist has been released as an eBook in the Amazon Kindle store and via Smashwords.  It’s now available for only $2.99, in a new revised edition.

Rumored to Exist is a collection of 201 vignettes or flash fiction pieces, loosely tied together into a non-linear narrative about a protagonist attempting to find meaning in a bizarre near-future world. It’s a densely packed stew of ideas flashed together, morphing between dreams, emails, conversations, and action. It’s a novel in the style of Naked Lunch, written for today’s short-attention-span hypertextual world.

Influenced heavily by Burroughs, Mark Leyner, Raymond Federman, and Hunter S. Thompson, Jon Konrath knit together the dense patchwork of fiction over a seven-year period in a half-dozen cities across the US.

It’s also still available in its original print edition from iUniverse, but why spend $15.95 and wait a week to kill another tree, when you can spend under three bucks and check this out now?  There’s also a free preview available on both Amazon and Smashwords, so check out the first part for free.

More info

• Rumored to Exist page
• Facebook fan page

Buy it now

• From Amazon.com (print)
• From Barnes and Noble (print)
• From Amazon.com (kindle)
• From Smashwords (eBook, online reading, Epub, PDF, LRF, or Palm Doc formats)

Details

• 264 pages (print)
• ISBN: 978-0595234769 (print, iUniverse)
• ISBN: 978-0-9844223-1-9 (eBook, Kindle)
• ISBN: 978-1-4581-0977-4 (eBook, Smashwords)

Check out my interview here:

http://sixquestionsfor.blogspot.com/2010/05/six-questions-for-jon-konrath-editor.html

http://www.hipsterbookclub.com/features/interviews/jonkonrath1008/index.html

This is cool to me because in the past, I’ve always used PoD services like Lulu.com to handle distribution, so my ISBNs came from their assigned blocks.  That meant that if you plugged in 978-0595134946 and looked up Summer Rain, you would see IUniverse as the publisher.  But now, my block of ISBN numbers will show Paragraph Line Books.

This is also a big point for me, because it’s the first major investment I had to take in getting things started here.  I hemmed and hawed over just going back to Lulu for fulfillment of the next zine, because I didn’t want to shell out $275 for ten numbers and then do one more issue and get bored.  But now that I have blown the money, I am on the hook for publishing another ten books in the future.  More about that later…