Just finished up a good bit of writing: Just shy of a thousand words, net, on the current mystery story, A Stab in the Dark, after going back and making some revisions based on my notes from the plane. Adding a character (now Sgt. Van Rijn) was very much the right thing to do, the writing is going much more smoothly now.
I now have all the logical pieces: A motive for each suspect, a plausible way each suspect could have done it, and, naturally, an UNBREAKABLE ABILI for each suspect 😉 The funny thing is, I’ve managed to pull in my academic research in a very interesting way. I’ll elaborate later — I need to find a place to put spoilery-type discussions of these pieces, either for people who have read them, or people who don’t care. Anyone familiar with WordPress have ideas?
Anyway, the first draft is nearly done. It’s very rough. For example, I still have characters named things like “Killer” and “Deadman”. One of those might cause problems on the suspense front. But the plot is all present and most of the scenes are there. It’s currently 5,500 words long. Looks to come in around 7,000 words for the first draft, and I bet I can shave that down toward 6k once I have a read-through, which was my original estimate for the piece.
John P. Murphy 
You could put the spoilers into Pages rather than posts; they’re meant as static content and don’t appear on the front page (but they’re easy to update). Your theme probably allows you to customize how one navigates to the pages (e.g. by top nav bar — unwieldy if you intend to have Pages up for lots of stories, although you could have one top-level Spoilers page and then sub-Pages for each story — or via a widget in the sidebar). Not really how Pages are meant to be used, but it would work. Of course people wouldn’t notice unless you called their attention to them (but people *can* comment on Pages, unless you disable that, so you could still have conversations).
You could also investigate whether it’s possible to tweak the display options on a category-by-category basis, and put all your spoilers posts into a Spoilers (or Works-in-Progress, or whatever) category, and see if you can have posts in that category have some kind of special display. I am not sure if this is possible, though; it didn’t intersect with anything I was trying to do this weekend. (At least, I assume you’re one of the people I was talking about. 😉
Ah! I didn’t realize that the top-level bar could have sub-pages. I’ll have to look into that.
(I need to see if I can figure out auto-approval, at least for people already logged in to WordPress…)
For the latter, look under Settings>>General>>Discussion in the sidebar on your dashboard. For the former, Page handling varies a lot by theme, so you’ll have to explore on your own :).
Also it’s doing a link preview when I hover over Reply, which makes it hard to actually….reply. (But I have a burning hatred of previews which is apparently not widely shared, so perhaps you should ignore me.)
Weird, I don’t get the preview when I hover over ‘Reply’. I wonder whether I fixed that while monkeying with the settings.
*I’M one of the people YOU were talking about. Clearly I need to have already gone to bed.
P.S. They only cause problems on the suspense front if they’re true. I think I have just dared you to write a story with a mild-mannered (yet always caught in bad situations, without an alibi) character named Killer.
This is true!