I apologize for the delay since my last update. Thank you for making room in your inbox for me!

Partially, I was embarrassed that the segment I've reported working on multiple times before--the dastardly 50-75% portion of the book--was still confounding me. But since I've now mostly wrapped that section, it finally feels like I'm making tangible progress on the book again.

So why did this section stymie for so long?

Outside of some key passages, it was mostly rewritten from scratch. (But the same applies to the 0-50% section, so it must also be that...)
I knew what I wanted to happen generally, and which revelations needed to occur in what order, but my outline was pretty nebulous. Here's an excerpt: "Dymond imparts knowledge about the 'shafts of light.' Sierra uses these to try and contact Eiden. In the meantime, they notice the Lore are like puppets; they can’t have real conversations with them." OK, but how does he impart this knowledge? Under what circumstances does she use it to try and contact Eiden? What happens to tip them off about the Lore? It was only a sketch, so there was a lot of making up the shapes as I went along. (Which I guess is all fiction writing, but it seems like there's an optimal tension between the two, and I felt I was striking far from it.)
Hand in hand with making stuff up is the inner editor who says, "Wouldn't it be much better if this scene happened first? And why are you doing this daytime thing now, when it would probably be night by then? Rearrange this, and it'll look a lot better, I promise."
Couple that with a vague, proprioceptive sense that I might have already written a few good paragraphs I can reuse here, or If I tweak this other existing scene a bit, I can make it fit into this hole, or Does this help or hurt the revised relationship between these characters?

So I ended up getting locked in these endless feedback loops that would never seem to go anywhere. This was and is intensely frustrating! I have to imagine that establishing a daily writing habit or doing pre-writing creativity exercises ("list all the potential uses of a brick," gag) would help mitigate this, but those are investments that are looking less appealing now that I'm rounding the bend.

All of the frustrations aside, I'm now quite happy with the revisions to 50-75%, and the section amounts to almost 30,000 words at current count (out of 84.5k total).

If you've made it this far down, thanks! Today I'm excited to release a new chapter, entitled "Hemera Maicas." This chapter is the rather dramatic (I think) conclusion to Act 1 of our story, so don't read it if you don't want to be spoiled. :)

~~"Hemera Maicas"~~ [obsolete link removed]