Strange

I suppose that I should probably take the time to explain Strange, before I start talking about it and confusing the heck out of everyone.

Strange is the working title of my longest, original WIP. The 'original' part of it is more or less self-explanatory -- it takes place in my own fantasy world. The 'longest' part applies to everything you could think it would apply to. I've been working on it for five years now. It's nearly 100k words long. It has a massively complicated plot that can be simplified into 'girl is fated to win a major war in her country', but doing so really loses a lot of its fun.

Strange is about a girl named Leyha. She was raised in a foreign country, because her parents' love was incredibly frowned upon. The two sides of her family run two subsections of the country right next to where she was raised, and have a long-standing feud between them. When she is taken from the only home she's known at the age of fourteen by her father's family, she discovers that she is supposed to possess a great power that will help her father's family win the war. She eventually gets fed up with the way her uncle, who has power over the throne after her father's death, and his lords are treating her, so she runs away to the other side of her family, where her mother is still alive. Her alliance goes back and forth and gets more confusing as time goes on, because her father's family is the one that's supposed to be the "bad" side, according to people outside of the country.

The fun part of Strange is that it gives me a place to play with the ideas of "good" and "bad". They're words/ideas that have interested me for a while, and I have lots of fun little things that I've done in the way of playing with the two ideas, and our preconceptions about what makes something good versus bad, especially in literature and film. For example, the Menla (Leyha's father's family) have their symbolic colour as black, and they are seen as the evil side by outsiders, but it turns out that they're much less restrictive and much more open with their citizens than the Pilo (Leyha's mother's family) are. It's a whole lot of fun, especially because good and bad become nothing more than ideas by the time the whole giant story arc is done.

Right, so, the reason this is coming up at all is because I wanted to have a reference of what it is, so that when I reference it later, you guys know what I'm  talking about -- or can have somewhere to look. Also, I'm bringing it up because I'm nearly finished what is looking like it will be the first of three or four books (probably four), because apparently my story arc is too big. 100k words, where I am right now, is barely finished the first half of the expositionary stuff. So, yeah, I don't know who would want to read a 400k book in one go either...

Anyway, just wanted to let the fanfiction readers of mine who may actually, on occasion, look at this, that I'll be working for the next maybe week or so to get this whole first part finished so I can figure out what I'm doing with the rest of it. So I'll be around, but rather sporadically, and not really with fanfiction all that much. Oh well. Sorry guys.