A humorous in-work example is the Youtube series You Suck at Photoshop. It's a series of videos teaching the viewer how to use Photoshop, but as the series progresses the audience learns all about the creator's personal problems by this trope.
Matthew Mercer suffered literalCreator Breakdown trying to produce the Grand Finale to There Will Be Brawl, to the point that he ended up on bed rest with a pinched nerve and caused the delay of the finale. In a subversion though, blame for this was squarely placed on Executive Meddling: The Escapist suddenly (without even consulting him) announced that the finale would premiere a week earlier than he had planned.
Nina Paley, after a bad breakup with her husband, found solace in the Ramayana, particularly the story of Rama saving his wife Sita and later having problems taking her back. The result: Sita Sings the Blues.
Noah Antwiler from The Spoony Experiment went through this in 2009 and 2011. In 2009, he was having equipment problems and site problems during the filming of the final Final Fantasy VIII video while he was moving out of his parents house. And in 2011, went through some hard times with a heart condition*
Which might force Noah to mellow the Spoony character a little, since the condition means getting too worked up could potentially be fatal
and a breakup with his girlfriend (who was also TSE's web mistress). In November 2011, he made a blog post confessing that his recent drop in production has mainly been due to him battling clinical depression - which the fans took to heart so much that the regular trolls have stayed away from that blog post.
Chaos Fighters: Chemical Warriors-RAKSA was created when the series creator suffering from depression. After ending an unpleasant internship experience, he realized how immature he is after being scolded by his entire family and having to finish his thesis within one month while his supervisor was at UK for two weeks with lab work unfinished. Deciding to extend, he spent time on the project, but he could not do it according to his schedule. This shows when the starscream appeared for the first time, a distressed dude has to be rescued and the heroine has to deal with people who believe that said dude in question is a villain instead of a victim. Also, updates were not done in daily basis. However, it still ends ideally as he promised to reduce the effect of this trope.
In the Metamor Keep setting, authors have had to either abandon the universe or slow down. Things that have plagued the authors include:
