Putting my finger on it

This is not dirty Ok. This is about figuring out what is wrong and how do I put my finger on it. How do I see what it is that is causing the story to go blah! Or the character to act out of, well, character. Or the plot to be, as Amanda used to type, WAY OVER THE TOP. So how do I put my finger on it.

I can do housework. but I usually decide that is too much of a sacrifice. I can read other books but since I have been in the middle of my own story, I cannot concentrate on anything other than diagolgue tags, action beats, paragraph structure, sentence structure, and all things about writing. I compare my own writing to everyone else's which causes depression to set in. I become dissatisfied with my writing and lack of skills and training and wonder if I am just this great big fraud. So I definitely don't read my thriller spy or mystery stories (that are my favorites - Vince Flynn, good god, now I can't even come up with my favorite author's names, wait...Baldacci, scott turow, Nelsen DeMille, Connolley, and Brad Thor. Ok I peeked at my unread books on the bookshelf. I have nearly 50 of them.

Back to putting my finger on it. I am stuck on Chapters 25, 26, 27. Not completely stuck since the chapters have been written but something is not right. Hence, I need to put my finger on the problem. What is wrong with it? Why does it bother me now that I have reread it after a couple of months. Egad is this going to keep happening as I revisit my other remaining chapters?

Is it the plotline? No. I like my plot/storyline. These three chapters push the story forward. Is it the characters? no their characterizations are true.

OK, I had finished polishing chapter 25 and it was ready to go to my first beta. Except. I want to not have a cliffhanger here. So I need to take the beginning of Chapter 26 and add back into chapter 25. That leaves me with one problem. chapter 26 becomes way too short. Which is Ok on occasion to just go with the flow when it comes to length of a chapter, but chapter 26 is now BLAH. I don't even want to read it. So how do I fix this. Must I take from chapter 27? then what happens to that chapter? 25 through 28 are the climatic end to the first book (remember I decided to go with Book I and Book II for shits and giggles).

Scenes. I must delve into the scene structure of these chapters. And I may need to take one whole subplot (tiny one) out of the story. Then I need to add in another scene or two that actually has meaning.

So I will re-read my chapters with scene additions and deletions in mind and then do housework. It is that critical! I have plenty of housework that has piled up so I should be able to put my finger on the problem. And then come up with a solution!

I shall conquer this.

Ok my finger has found the problem:

ROMANCE. Must add the missing Romance from Chapter 26. there needs to be romance. Why did I not include it before? Duh.

Now on to finishing my housework. Damn. This is a bad sign. I find my answers while cleaning my house. Bah. Let us hope there are not many problems in the future.