What should a good theoretical physics PhD progress look like at the beginning of 3rd year?
"but the projects didn't work out and I had to can the drafts" — this sounds weird to me. It is not rare at all for a project/idea not to work ou the way you would like, but for it to fail so utterly that you cannot get any work published out of it, i.e. that there is nothing for the community to learn from it, is rather rare. That it happened multiple times might be an indicator that you threw the towel too early, or that you could be looking harder into how to extract something useful from your failed attempt. Helping you out with that would typically be the job of your advisor, because it is not the easiest part of the job...

Other than that, your account does not look particularly worrying: as others have noted, you have already built a good network of collaborations, have one publication, and advanced your course requirements... Sounds good to me!