[Note: this is part 2 of 8 of the complete text for John Sheppard's book Tales of the Peacetime Army. To start reading at the beginning and for a full list of all parts, please go to the table of contents.

And if you like the story, please visit the book's page and consider buying a copy!]

THE U.S. ARMY ART SCHOOL

My orders had me going to Lowry Air Force Base, Colorado, for my advanced individual training (AIT).

Colorado. Purple mountains.

The pass-in-review ceremony involved standing in formation in my class A uniform while a couple of dignitaries spoke. Maybe one of them was the base commandant. I think the dude was a general. He hopped into a jeep and drove around us, for inspection purposes. Then we passed in review, marching past the reviewing stand. Eyes right!

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[Note: this is part 1 of 8 of the complete text for John Sheppard's book Tales of the Peacetime Army. To start reading at the beginning and for a full list of all parts, please go to the table of contents.

And if you like the story, please visit the book's page and consider buying a copy!]

BASIC TRAINING

I had an unimportant job in the food service industry and an unimportant college career, both lazily going nowhere. Maybe I should have fallen in love with someone. That would have made everything seem more important, I suppose.

My academic advisor called me into her dust-mote speckled office in a creaky, one-hundred-year-old building on a late-Spring day and informed me that I wasn’t doing as well as she expected. I was ten semester hours shy of a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. I stared out her office window. The sky was blue and drizzled with vapor trails from passing jumbo jets. “Have you been listening?” she asked me. She was self-important in a fussy way. Continue Reading »

[Note: this is the index for the complete text for John Sheppard's book Tales of the Peacetime Army. We'll update the links below as each new piece is pubished online.

And if you like the story, please visit the book's page and consider buying a copy!]

TALES OF THE PEACETIME ARMY
SOLDIER’S MANUAL/
TRAINER’S GUIDE
SKILL LEVEL 1/2/3

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Back in 2007, Paragraph Line Books published John Sheppard’s Tales of the Peacetime Army. It’s a great little book that depicts this Florida punk who joins the Reagan-era army. Although it’s an excellent book, we didn’t do a good job of promoting it, and it fell through the cracks.

Now, with John’s blessing, I’d like to give all of you a chance to read this book for free. To do this, I’m posting all of the text here in the blog, piece by piece so you can enjoy it. I would really stress though that if you dig the story, please check out the paper book. John designed the book to look like one of those Army manuals with a long technical title and government fonts and goofy line art and the whole nine yards, and it’s something you really need to hold in your hands to fully appreciate. But I hope you can enjoy the story here in blog format.

I’ll keep a rough index here as I post each installment, so you can backtrack and read them all in order if you find this post later in the future. Right now, I need to chop up and reformat the text so it fits here, so stay tuned, and check out the page and video trailers in the meantime.

A little over a year ago, I did an interview in Hipster Book Club, a site that covers news and reviews of cool alt/indie lit. The interview covered a lot of ground, but I specifically covered the genesis of Aitpl and why I decided to start the project. Check it out here:

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

Just a quick note to tell you what you can already see if you’re reading from our actual site – I have changed blog themes, and have a lot of layout tweaking ahead of me.  I am also in the process of streamlining the whole paragraphline.com web site and moving it all to WordPress (I think.)

Give me a holler if you see anything out of place or dysfunctional.  I’m in the middle of working on the book layout for Air in the Paragraph Line #13, so you may have to mind the dust for a bit longer.

This is old news, but I thought I’d point it out for your reading pleasure.  It’s a review of John Sheppard’s Tales of the Peacetime Army, which was the first book that Paragraph Line Books published.

http://www.babygotbooks.com/2008/02/04/tales-of-the-peacetime-army/

I always loved this book, especially the layout, which looks like those Army publications on how to set up a grenade launcher or avoid getting herpes overseas that you’d see in a box in the local Army/Navy surplus store.  And it’s no coincidence – in a previous life, John used to illustrate those things when he was in the army.

If you haven’t checked this out, it’s worth a look.  And John wrote another book that’s similar, but much more multi-faceted called In Between Days, which is his best yet. He published it himself on lulu, and it went somewhat unnoticed, but it was probably the best book I read in 2009, so check it out.

I just got an email this morning containing the first block of ISBN numbers assigned to Paragraph Line books!

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…

Hey all,

Just a reminder that you can read issues 1-12 of Air in the Paragraph Line for free online.  They’re all available in PDF format for download, absolutely free.  The only catch is that I’d appreciate if you told your friends if you dig it, and if you’re really cool, you might want to buy the paper editions and stay tuned for the future ones.

Check out the archive here: http://paragraphline.com/journal/archives.html

We’ve had a MySpace page for Air in the Paragraph Line for a while now, but it appears that MySpace has all but died, and everyone uses Facebook these days.  S0 I’ve created a Facebook fan page for Air in the Paragraph Line.  Right now, it just mirrors these blog posts, but it seems like people seem to dig reading stuff in one place, so there you go.

Check out the page at the following long and unwieldy URL: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Air-in-the-Paragraph-Line-zine/224538232460