Created By James Milligan	Anara is hosted at Mecha.com	This comic is rated NC-17. You have been warned.

	So, what is Anara, anyway? That's a very good question. Anara: Fati Caminus is at its simplest a web graphic novel. I hesitate to call it a web comic because that tends to make people think of a daily, or two-or-three times a week update schedule, usually done in serial, with a punchline either once a strip or once a week. "Web Comic" means a story that doesn't ever really "end" unless the creator gets burned out or decides to move on to something else. "Web Comic" means straightforward stories, infrequent use of extended plotlines, and a three to four panel layout. "Web Comic" makes people think "make with the funny," even though most print-comics are not humorous in the slightest way. Anara is not about making with the funny, it's about the lives of its characters, it's about the history of the world it takes place on, it's about right and wrong and everything in the middle, it's about love and death and life and loss, and, to make this even longer, telling a story that's been scratching and clawing at the inside of my skull since I was a child. Sounds all auspicious, doesn't it? So, what does that mean? That means that Anara is treated like a novel. It's got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Characters will develop, change, and even die, as the story progresses. I know how it starts, how it ends, and everything in the middle. It's my job as the writer to take this story and give it to my artists, so that we can give it to you and let you enjoy it. What's Anara's history? Anara started as a very, very complex tabletop RPG, and didn't look anything like what the current incarnation looks like. It was a hodge podge of various systems, with too many rules for combat and not enough for anything else. Plus, it was a Science Fiction Bug Hunt. Not very similar to the "Question Authority/Can Fate Be Altered?" fantasy setting it has become. Essentially, it mutated and matured as I did, refining and redefining itself as my skill at storytelling and world-creation matured. I am very pleased to say that a steady course of very critical but enthusiastic instructors and friends who weren't afraid to tell me what very urgently needed to be changed resulted in what Anara has become. Anara went from RPG to doodled comic to fiction-setting and back to RPG before it became this. It's been run through several systems and is finally settling on the Open Game and FUZION licenses, as both of those will allow me to do with it what needs to be done. So Anara's an RPG as well as a comic? Not yet. The RPG is currently under development. Even though ninety percent of the groundwork has already been laid by the people that developed the systems Anara will use, the remaining ten percent involves creation of classes (the standard OGL classes simply do not fit into the worldset of Anara), streamlining or replacing rules, making up conversion sets in case people want to use "System A" instead of "System B," and a whole lot of typing, layout, and design work. And that doesn't even begin to cover scouting printers. No, Anara won't be ready for a while, in print RPG form. There may be the occassional "sneak peek" posted on this site, or the Atomic Rocket Games site, for the Anara RPG, but that remains to be seen. What does "Fati Caminus" mean, anyway? I don't know Latin, but I know people who do. It is the closest I could get to "The Fires Of Fate," which ties in to the whole "Can a person change their fate?" Really, it comes from my utter distaste of, and disbelief in, the concept of predestination, since free will would seem by its very nature to immediately disprove predestination. In Anara, however, one of the most stringently held beliefs of the people, regardless of religion or race, is that Fate is a tangible force, something that can be altered, bent, and coerced, but never broken or avoided. In fact, Sass't, one of the main characters, is the son of the now deceased Dragon God of Fate, Marssa Tak. Fate is, to the people of Anara, something that you can't avoid, something that will sweep over you, and burn away parts of your being, leaving only that which truly matters to the world as a whole. It's a concept that's really foreign to a lot of people, and I want to see what happens when I start dealing with it. That's pretty deep for a comic book. Well, yeah. I took a lot of philosophy and critical/creative writing classes in High School and College. I'm wacky like that. If I ask a question, can I get it on the website? If it's a good one, sure! That's it for now. Enjoy the comic!