Handling long strings

Looking for advice on how to handle long strings. I need to accomidate entries that are between about 4000 and 16000 chars long. I've heard some bad stuff about blobs, but I'm still open to using them. Another possibility I thought of is adding an "order" field to my table, making the place that holds the text a constant 4000 chars, and making the index number on the table not be unique. Any thoughts?

What have you heard reguarding BLOBs? Without second thought I'd go with a BLOB column, it would be much faster and more efficient then using multiple TEXT columns.