Self-Critique

So I've been reading the Palmer Affair, from start to finish, and I'm not happy with it. It lacks velocity and emotion. It definitely reflects the fact that while writing it, I was consumed, drained and distracted by other tasks (like moving my family back from Europe and getting resettled in the United States). I'm going to have to rewrite a good portion of it, and inject the atmosphere and feeling I feel when I tell the story to myself. At the moment, it's written in third person. I might change that to first person. That alone would make it more immediate, might remove the emotional wall that separates the author from the main character. It would be interesting, though, a woman writing a first-person narrative in which the "I" is the voice of a man. On the other hand, that seems to be part of the problem: the female characters are strong; while my male characters ... hmmm, I don't know. I'm not happy with it.