As a veteran of many Olympics past, I'll weigh in with my observations from experience here:

1) Two weeks should be long enough. The original Olympics period was only one week, and that was long enough as well. The majority of Olympics writers in every Olympics have been able to make the deadline. Honestly, I used to run Iron Fic events, and for the authors in those events, one *hour* was enough. It's not about how much time is really, truly needed to write; it's about managing expectations and self-discipline. Those are part of the challenge -- and the fun -- of the event.

The caveat of course is that two weeks will be enough *if* the author picks and devises a story short enough to be written in that time according to their own writing speed. Some people *cough Reikah cough* can write 22k words in twelve hours. Others might need the entire week to write 1000 words. That is why there is no minimum word limit. Authors should pick a word target that they can meet within the deadline.

Conversely, it's been my experience -- both my direct personal experience and my observation of others -- that longer deadlines do not actually translate to more time. Instead, they just allow the authors to put off their actual writing time until the end. Shorter deadlines are more successful at keeping writers on task, because the deadline is more imminent. Longer writing periods also encourage writers to come up with longer, more complex story ideas, which a) make it even more difficult to finish on time and b) make it more difficult for the readers to get through all the stories in the voting period. We do not want that; thus shorter stories are encouraged. If a writer is inspired by an idea which would be better suited to a long epic, that's fantastic! -- but maybe better tackled over a longer period of time, at their own pace.

2) Two weeks is technically only the timespan given to the unlucky soul that has to post on the first day; the luckiest writer will have a full three weeks to finish, and we compile the schedule to accomodate (where possible) people who say they need more time.

3) I have never, ever participated in an Olympics where the writing deadline was not extended at least once. But for the reasons described in point 1, it's better not to give the writers that expectation up front.