I absolutely, completely understand why anyone would cancel their pledge and I don't blame them. My goal is a release a really great chapter 1, and do it when it's ready. Patreon makes it very easy for people to cancel and pause their subscriptions, and I wish they made it easier for creators to switch back and forth between charging monthly and per release. But if I switch to a per release model, I can never go back to monthly, so I've kept it monthly and let people decide if they want to support me, knowing full well that I slowly chip away at this new story.
You are right though, I should post on patreon more and provide better status updates. There's a lot of things in my life I need to be better at, and that seems like a very managable one to start with!