First Full read of my latest novel

I've been working on my novel MIND THIEF for way too long, oddly enough I hadn't really read it until this weekend. That sounds strange but that's the way I decided to do it, very few edits until the first draft was done.

A lot of the problems I thought it had it either didn't or they were a lot more minor than I thought. That's a good thing.

But I ran into a problem that I wasn't expecting. In reading it I am really getting into the characters, and am slightly annoyed when the plot pulls me away from them. Part of this is because the transitions are still rough, it is hard to transition from one scene to the next before you've written that scene. But it is a little perplexing.

The second part is I started the first chapter at the event that triggers all the shadow figures to come after our poor protagonist, the logical place as it is a technological thriller. Unfortunately that event is him meeting our heroine and experiencing love at first sight, which he thinks is lust. That is the classic starting place for a romance.

Unfortunately, at this point there isn't much I can do as I know I am way to close the work to view it objectively. I'll have to clean up the transitions and throw some more action verbs into the plot parts to see if I spent too much time drooling over my characters and not enough time tightening the action, then have some beta readers tell me if the problem is me or the book.

I've really never encountered this problem as I tend to think of myself as more of an idea writer than a character writer. I just thought the idea was on such a grand scale it would need powerful characters to fill it out, I wasn't expecting the characters to overpower the pretty powerful plot.

I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem of a one element of their book overpowering what they thought was the main element, and what if anything you did about it?