STATE OF THE BLOG 2005
by Wred Fright

This will be the last post either Pat King or myself will make on Underground Literary Adventures during our editorial run because we're now turning over editorial duties to the new co-editors and fellow Underground Literary Alliance members, Marissa Ranello and Patrick Simonelli. We hope this will be the first of many "changes of the guard" on the blog, bringing fresh and different perspectives from the underground.

Pat King started the blog in 2004 as an experiment. It initially ran ULA news and he generously shared the blog with others in the ULA. For a time, it even served as a prototype of King Wenclas's blog. In the spring of 2004, Pat decided to start running a wider variety of material on the blog, including fiction and other writing by ULA members. At about the same time, I had been desiring to publish a printed book anthology of ULA writing so others could read the material for themselves and understand why myself and so many other enthusiasts of indie and underground literature found it such exciting and refreshing reading. Unfortunately, that old stumbling block, money, kept putting the goal of a printed book further off in the future, but with the blog, there was an opportunity to do the anthology in a certain fashion online. I pitched the idea to Pat and he liked it, and we were off, running material from an assortment of indie, underground, and zine writers, more or less weekly, showcasing the great and diverse writing of the literary underground. Ultimately we ran 47 pieces, fiction, nonfiction, prose, poetry, whatever struck us, from 37 different writers. I hope the numbers will only grow in the future under Marissa and Patrick and beyond! Thanks for reading and please keep doing so as I suspect there are many more underground literary adventures ahead of us!

Wred Fright served as one of the initial co-editors of this blog for the Underground Literary Alliance, along with Pat King. He resides in Cleveland, Ohio. His novel The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus will be published this year by the ULA imprint of Out Your Backdoor! Press.