There's some advice I wish I'd had before starting Too Much Love (and should have inferred from previous works.) When starting a long story with a lot of moving pieces, particularly for a site like SOL, also start a continuity document.
This is an artifact borrowed from comic books and soap operas - two other media that distribute "unfinished" work in a serial fashion. Eventually, a work gets too long for any one person to keep in their head even if they wrote it all and questions like "How long did Shelby live in Brownfield Mills?" and "How old is Pilar?" become increasingly difficult to answer.
As I posted chapter 47 and finished writing the first draft of chapter 52, the number of continuity issues that have slipped into TML are becoming a real problem. To combat this, I'm taking the time to pull together a continuity guide. It contains the following:
* a brief scene-by-scene summary of the published work including the date the scene took place and the viewpoint character
* an alphabetical list of the major characters with crucial biographical details and a list of what they did in each scene they appeared in
* a list of minor characters who were named and the section they were named in
* a list of settings central to the story
* a list of "stuff to know about" - things that aren't characters or settings, but are crucial to the story.
Based on the first two days of work, this will probably take about two weeks to assemble. If I'd started it at the beginning, it would have taken less than an hour each time I published a chapter.