I am working on my first long book series, and I have learned a couple tricks through that process that really helps with keeping the mythology correct.
Basically, when you’ve built up an area with an oppressive amount of mythology, leave it.
Force your characters to an unexplored area of the map, and don’t go back to the old area either ever, or for a long while until that area of the map has changed.
Then, you can explore the same areas again, completely changed.
It’s totally cheating, but audiences eat it up and think you’re the greatest world builder ever, instead of just somebody who can’t keep their mythology straight, or is scared of breaking the universe.
I learned this from video games, except that video games make you go back to the starting realm a lot. I prefer to blow up that starting area and force people to use new areas of the map all the time, so I can continue to build the mythology in a new area, which can be completely new mythology than the last area, and could even contradict the previous area, based on their views.
It has the ancillary benefit of keeping me interested when I’ve lost my love for a particular area.
A second tip is that using multiple points of view (POVs) automatically doubles, triples, or exponentially increases the word count, and lets you show the same areas from a different character’s POV, allowing you to explore the same places or new places with fresh eyes.
Those are the two tricks I’ve learned to writing long interconnected series. Yes, it’s harder to keep the POVs straight, but it’s way easier overall, because you get to move away from boring places and only show the most interesting parts from the most interesting POVS.
I have found that multiple POVS actually decreases the difficulty level because every time you’re stuck, you just cut away to another character, and days, weeks, or months could have passed between the last time you saw them.
The disadvantage to this is you have to keep the main characters apart for most of the book. You don’t want to have the MCs seeing the same thing all the time. The book then becomes as much about how do you keep characters apart as when do you crash them together again to exchange the knowledge they’ve gained.
Of course, this again adds the conflict, because each main character gets to build their own party, but if you really want your two POV characters together, you can’t do that. They have to each be on their own little quests, again like Game of Thrones. So, you are really telling several mini-stories instead your bigger book, which itself is a part of a bigger overall narrative.
Honestly, that thing is so helpful for how to cheat with fantasy.
So, if you want to make a long series, but you’re completely overwhelmed by keeping the mythology straight, I recommend telling the story from many POVs to keep things interesting at all time, padding the word count, and then blowing up areas all the time once the mythology becomes too cumbersome.
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