User blog comment:Owenandheatherfan/Read About - Week One/@comment-1874924-20121110010303/@comment-1874924-20121110180947

Assigning recently finished stories could also preserve the purpose, although I agree that in-progress is probably better.

If you wanted to assign longer stories, one way to approach that would be to expand that round, so contestants would have more time (e.g. 2 weeks for 20K words or 3 weeks for 30K, keeping to the 10K/week average) but it would still be just one round of the competition, with either one quiz or multiple quizzes aggregated. That approach might create its own logistical problems, but it's a possibility.