Finer navigation within categories

I am a writer, and I’m using my wordpress blog to post my stories. I have a number of different stories, and each has its own category, as well as a parent category that represents the ‘world’ in which the story took place (Like all the Harry Potter books would be under a parent ‘Harry Potter’category.) as well as every story being under a huge category just called Writing.

My issue is that I want it to be easy for people to get to the beginning of a story, and then read through to the end. The issue right now is that there seems to be no dynamic link for the ‘first’ (ie, first posted) post in a category, or even the first page of posts in a category. (Page 1 is considered to be the most recent posts.)

Right now I have the first post in each story hard coded into a page, and then I have manually put in html links for previous and next posts in that story (category) each time I put up a new post, but that is horrible and time consuming and I hate it.

I have tried to add a category previous and next to the single.php page, but since my stories all have multiple categories, the previous and next links don’t even show up on the page. Not to mention there is no way to just designated the one category you do want.

I tried to make that as clear as possible. I’m sorry if it’s not. Any help would be appreciated, and I’ll try to clarify anything that might need to be.