Yup, makes sense.
My recommendation is focus on the login script last, create a story handler first.
For handling stories, I don tknow what structure you want, but the approach I was going to take was simply to have each episode store it's details as expected (authorID as opposed to a name/email, so you could relate this to the users table), as well as it's parent ID.
That way, all you need to do to find children is simply to do a search on the "parent ID" table using the current episode ID as the parent ID to relate, and then sort by the date (store date as Unix_time and apply time conversions later, it'll make sorting A LOT easier for you!)
Handle anything fancier like styles and logins last, build your foundation before you build your walls and roof :)
A demonstration of the data handling method I wanted to use (not exactly mine, but is SQL compatible and the diagram demonstrates what I'm on about) is here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13585460/sql-tree-traversal-down-to-the-root-and-back-up-one
