SwissMiss' Creativity Outlet

True, but then hp_darkfest had no minimum length, only 2 months to write, was an open prompt fest with no pressure to finish, and still ended up with 4 fics longer than 10,000 words (and of those, 2 longer than 20K). samhain_smut also had a 500 word minimum, only 2 months to write, and had 2 fics over 10,000 words, one of which was 35K (although it was an exchange, so that's a bit different). I'm just saying those are the typical patterns for a fest like this. Something else that may have contributed to relatively low word counts here is that there were many other fests and exchanges running in the same time period, and many of the authors and artists were creating for multiple fests.