Doesn't getting a *book* published count as progress on a fiction project? It's not new to you any more, sure, but all the work surrounding getting it published... That's progress.

I can also see where doing lots of writing-related work might take from the writing energies for a while. Oddly, I find that for me this sometimes happens between certain types of programming and writing, as if they draw from the same reserve. (Mostly when writing huge new swathes of functionality. Debugging and story-writing are orthogonal.)