I'm thinking about stealing a page from Nick Scipio's book.
Not literally of course. I don't know if any part of "Summer Camp" has ever actually been published as physical books but if it has, I certainly wouldn't do anything so vulgar. Metaphorically however, Nick does something with his long-running saga that is starting to make sense for the Billionaire Life (of which I'm currently posting book 1: Too Much Love.)
At some point in his stories, Nick uses a framing prologue of a character looking back on his life and how he got where he is. This is hardly a unique technique to Mssr. Scipio, but what is pretty unique is that Nick creates a prologue with unanswered questions and doesn't answer them for multiple books. Anyone who's read Scipio's forums has heard endless iterations of "who's the wife?" and "who's dead?"
What may not be obvious to anyone reading "Too Much Love" as I post it is that it's going to be long. I just posted chapter 15, but I'm working on chapter 30 today and the story is still growing in scope. Realistically, it could run to 50-90+ chapters totalling 1,200-2,000 printed pages.
And it's book one. Book two will probably be notably shorter because it doesn't have to get the characters as far. I started book one with the stated goal of getting characters who behaved like relatively normal suburban eighteen year olds behaving like they lived in erotica without magically skipping any steps along the way. That takes about thirty-five chapters to fully evolve.
It wouldn't be anywhere near that long if the story were just about sex. But as that first arc evolves, I'm also setting the groundwork for Act II and Act III of the first book where the themes introduced are rather absurdly grandiose and, baldly stated, would make me put down a book that starts with six chapters of lingerie models playing Dungeons & Dragons and doesn't have a sex scene (except in flashback) until chapter 8 and go read something else. If you don't walk the road to Xanadu, that pleasure dome just seems gaudy.
I really could have only written this story for SOL. When I started "Too Much Love," I knew where I wanted to start, where I wanted to end, and that I wanted to introduce the Stone Family to the world along the way, but most of the path from A to B travelled through a blank part of the map marked "Thar Be Dragons Here." I couldn't have gotten as far as I have in this story without reader feedback. I had to write it and show it to people in order to shape it into an actual novel.
Having hacked through that jungle, found those dragons, and discovered they are much more interesting people than Saint George would have us believe, I now feel like there's an unintentional dishonesty in how this story starts. By the smallness and tightness of it, the geographic claustrophobia of setting the first nine chapters of it almost entirely in a single building, it declares, "I'm an odd, little story." But while "Too Much Love" is certainly odd, thinking it's going to be little is like stepping on the D train at Bleecker-Lafayette and finding out it runs to Kathmandu.
(At least three major characters make it to Kathmandu in Chapter 29.)
So, I'm planning to add a prologue to Too Much Love, but I haven't settled on a mechanism for distribution. Post-as-you-write is wonderful, but it's not a great mechanism for going back to the beginning and making changes. Either readers won't notice the change or they, quite rightly, will be annoyed that you changed what they already wrote.
Right now, my preferred mechanism is to post the prologue (when it's done) as a separate piece on SOL, marking it as first in The Billionaire Life and giving it a description that makes clear what it is, then directing interested readers to it. But, I'm open to suggestions of a better way.
Fellow writers, have you ever done something like this? If so, how? Readers, how would you like to see this material presented?