Look at abandoned long-form projects and the pattern is consistent. Very few stopped because the story failed or the audience left. They stopped because the person making them could not continue, having set a pace that worked for four months and did not work for eighteen. That is the ordinary failure mode in this field and it is largely preventable.
Talking about it plainly is useful because the alternative is treating it as a personal failing, which it is not. It is a scheduling error compounded over time, and scheduling errors can be corrected.
The sustainable rate is lower
Anybody can work at an elevated rate for a while, and that rate feels like their capacity because it is being demonstrated. The rate that can be kept indefinitely is usually somewhere around two thirds of it, and the difference is invisible until the gap has been accumulating for a year.
The practical test is whether a normal week leaves anything spare. A schedule that requires every good day and tolerates no bad ones is not a schedule, it is a streak, and streaks end. Building slack in is what converts one into the other.
Public schedules are hard to change
A weekly release announced to an audience is a commitment that becomes very difficult to reduce, because reducing it feels like failure and readers notice. Many creators therefore keep an unsustainable schedule long past the point where they wanted to change it.
Announcing a slower rate than you can manage is the reliable answer. A fortnightly schedule with occasional extra releases reads as generous; a weekly schedule with occasional misses reads as unreliable, and the actual output can be identical.
Buffers are the main defence
Building several finished instalments before publishing anything is the single most effective protection available. A buffer absorbs illness, bad weeks and unexpected work, and it converts a hard deadline into a soft one without the audience ever knowing.
Buffers erode, so they need defending. The temptation when the buffer is healthy is to relax, and the discipline is to keep producing at the same rate until the buffer reaches its intended size and then hold it there rather than spending it.
What actually exhausts people
Not usually the drawing. More often the accumulation of everything around it: administration, promotion, correspondence, platform changes, and the constant low-level decision-making that the working practices in the piece on working faster are designed to reduce.
Isolation is the other frequent cause, particularly for people working alone on long projects. Regular contact with anybody who understands the work, even briefly, changes how sustainable a year feels, and it is the thing that gets dropped first when time is short.
Recovery is slower than the damage
The asymmetry that catches people out is that a month of overwork takes considerably more than a month to recover from. That makes the arithmetic of pushing through a deadline much worse than it appears, since the borrowed time is repaid with interest.
It also means early intervention matters. Reducing a schedule when it starts to feel heavy is far cheaper than stopping entirely six months later, and reductions made early are usually temporary while stops made late frequently are not.
Separating the work from the account
A large part of the fatigue in this field comes from the requirement to be present publicly as well as to produce. Those are two jobs, and treating them as one means the harder days affect both. Setting limited times for public engagement, rather than being continuously available, is a defence that costs almost nothing in reach.
The mailing list argument in the piece on publishing without a platform helps here too, since a direct channel reduces the need to maintain constant presence on services designed to reward it.
Setting a rate you can keep
Announce less than you can do, build a buffer and defend it, reduce the surrounding decisions, keep contact with other people who work this way, and cut the schedule early rather than late. That is how long projects get finished, and it has very little to do with drawing.
Our own working standards are described in the editorial principles.