

If your remote is completely empty and has no commits, you can just push normally. If it has an auto-generated “initial commit” (pretty sure Github does something like that), you could force push, or merge your local branch into the remote branch and push normally. I think cloning the repo and copying the contents of your local repo into it is the worst option: you’ll lose all local commits.
It’s definitely possible to store the stories in columns, but there’s also very little reason to do it. I think filepath in SQL and the stories in separate files in whatever format makes the most sense (html, txt, epub). If you ever want to search the stories for keywords, write a python script to build indexes in SQL, performs much better than doing LIKE on a maxed out varchar column.
I was thinking maybe Elastisearch, but I don’t know how much work that is to set up. For a hobby project, writing your own indexer isn’t too hard and might be more fun and easier to maintain than an industry-grade solution.