Like, you're doing this for fun and don't owe anybody your productivity, I totally get that, but you understand that if we compare your planned outline with your demonstrable rate of production, statistically you will die of old age before reaching the first intermission, right?

To be clear, this is not ragging on anybody for their update schedule. This is pointing out that if Homestuck had averaged three updates a week over its run – itself an extraordinarily aggressive schedule for an indie webcomic! – it would have taken fifty years to publish. Andrew Hussie is a freak; don't put that expectation on yourself.

(Well, Andrew Hussie is a freak and also made extensive use of unpaid fan labour, occasionally in ways which arguably violated child labour laws, but that's a whole other topic.)

on andrew hussie's insane production output and unpaid fan labour, walkaround programmer (and accomplished developer) gankra recalled:

I can't emphasize this scramble enough. Andrew was a ceaseless content machine, and I don't think I was ever "blocked" on him producing content. Which is ridiculous considering how much content is packed into our games. (like, hundreds of pages of dialogue)... I honestly pushed myself too hard here. I don't think Andrew really understood how hard this stuff was on me; I think he's a good enough guy that he would've given me more space if he realized what I was doing to myself. But he's just so productive and I burnt myself out really hard trying to keep up with someone who, ultimately, was my hero that I didn't want to disappoint. I have two intense nega-tive memories from working on homestuck:

* Begging Andrew (I think I was in tears irl) to just wait another day for me to finish one of our pro-jects, because he wanted to start posting more pages of the story (he was that far ahead of me).

* Being so stressed out from working on one of our projects that I went to a party and drunk myself sick (I normally don't drink alcohol at all, for context)

tauhid bondia, a cartoonist friend from their gangbunch days, said:

We [Gangbunch] would often marvel at his [Andrew's] ability to start and then inexplicably finish things... Because he is a machine made of metal and lubricant.

it even got to hussie sometimes. from homestuck book 3's commentary:

This potato is RED FUCKING HOT! Gotta keep moving, keep writing, keep posting, posting, POSTING! This is how you do it guys, you never let not knowing how something looks or how a thing quite works yet stop you from making stuff at a dangerously unhealthy clip. You JUST. DON'T. STOP!

pretty intense stuff

Yeah, I'm seeing folks in the notes going "oh, Homestuck could do that because it was basically just a sprite comic" like, no, Homestuck could do that because Andrew Hussie is some sort of high-powered mutant, and for the later, more complicated bits he also had a whole team of unpaid assistants in more or less permanent crunch mode backing him up. A webcomic running separate morning and evening updates every day of the week for months at a stretch is not achievable under reasonable working conditions, and if you try it yourself you will die.

Nowadays Homestuck is known as the hiatus webcomic, but you need to understand that at its peak, it was known as that weird comic that updated MULTIPLE PAGES EVERY SINGLE DAY. The first five acts were posted in a little over TWO YEARS. The trolls were introduced ONE YEAR into the comic's run!

I find that folks whose experience with webcomics started with Homestuck tend to have a deeply warped notion of what a normal update schedule looks like. "But Homestuck had multiple year-long hiatuses" yeah, and that's the normal part. That is a thing that normal webcomics do. Homestuck was unexceptional for its hiatuses. It's everything else about Homestuck's production that's unhinged, often in ways that prompt genuine ethical concerns.

Hussie himself explaining why he eventually stopped that insane schedule:

Let me put it this way. You may work a full time job. It may be that something happens in your life that makes your job more difficult, because you are preoccupied. Your work may suffer to some extent, but you can still approximately match what's expected of you, because there is a partition between your job and your home life. You may nevertheless feel your full time job seems to dominate your existence, saps your energy, and leaves your weekend respites feeling all too short. This is not an experience I share, because MSPA is not a full time job. If you have such a job, then I would have to RADICALLY REDUCE my workload to match your level of day to day preoccupation.

The actual quantities involved have always been nebulous and I never made a point of keeping track, but 12 hours per day seems like a pretty reasonable average, since that is just shy of all waking hours. Time spent writing, drawing, animating, or just spacing out at my monitor while contemplating all the moving parts. This is what I did every day, including weekends and holidays, for two years, and to some extent another year prior to that with Problem Sleuth. Only a few weekends were missed due to conventions, and there was a single week off immediately following the infamous "robo smooch", and that's it. (Most of that week was spent wondering why the hell I wasn't updating…) There are other gaps in the archive, spanning days or a week, when I was animating. Those spans involved the usual work schedule, while simply omitting sleep!

Not only is this an unreasonable workload to expect of anyone, it's practically impossible to pull it off. Maybe you can expect some committed guy out there to really buckle down and duplicate that effort for a month or two. But years? Too much can crop up in the white noise of normal life to destabilize it. Momentum is absolutely crucial for maintaining that kind of pace. I find that if I only do an hour of work in a day, I get ten minutes of work done. If I do 12 hours of work, I seem to get 24 hours of work done. This is especially true of animation. Such projects notoriously take a very long time. I feel like because of the crazy head of steam I've built up from years of nonstop effort, I can knock out in days something that might take another animator a week. Or in a week what might take a month. Without that momentum, it's not possible. Starting up Flash cold is excruciating. Getting your head back into the stride of a story wastes energy you wouldn't use if you never broke stride. Without the momentum, the pace reverts to ordinary. Getting distracted by life destroys the momentum.
I've been pretty zealous about deflecting the distractions, even when I move, as I often do.

A notable example was last year when I came back from the Emerald City con in Seattle, and found my apartment flooded. The con was already enough of a time sink, so I didn't have much of an appetite for going into personal crisis mode. I just kind of shrugged, picked my computer off the lone, miraculously dry part of the floor, dropped it in a temporary residence, and kept drawing. I think the flood mess occupied about a day of my attention, whereas something like that could easily take up weeks of your time and energy if you're living that "normal life". You know how it is, you come home and find water up to your ankles and go aw fuck, what's ruined, what needs replacing, gotta call whoever and deal with the fuckin landlord about stuff and auuuugh. I just didn't bother with any of that, because it just didn't seem to matter, and I preferred to keep working and not give a crap about all my soggy bullshit. And in retrospect, I guess it really didn't matter.

ALT

Holy shit. "The demese ef the Ne'enderthels: Wes lengege a fecter?" published in the Science magazine

short but sweet