What's Happened To My Writing?

I'm settling into my new writing routine, which I did not choose, but I need to live with. Now I'm only writing a couple of days a week, and my sessions are short. If I'm going to continue with this novel, I have to make this new routine work. It could be that the shortened time just doesn't fit me or that I'm losing interest.

I wrote one scene yesterday, and it wasn't even a long scene. That doesn't bother me as much as the lifelessness of it. I never really plan ahead, but waaaay back in the manuscript I'd hinted at a secret that the main character's mentor has, and it was now time to reveal it. The reveal should have played out with more impact than what I came up with yesterday, but somehow it felt like I was just going through the motions. I revealed the secret through the mentor's actions; not by having her just blurt it out, and thus my MC was a witness to its unfolding. Show; don't tell, right? 

That should have been interesting; shocking, but maybe my heart wasn't in it. The mentor says things and MC and the mentor's assistant trade worried glances, and on and on and on...until the two need to find a way to extract the mentor from the situation she initiated. Well, that was anticlimactic. It makes me question creating the secret in the first place. 

This is how my recent writing sessions have gone. It's not that my scenarios aren't ripe with possibilities; it's that I can't seem to take advantage of them. Take the awards show scene, for example. It had a lot of moving parts and it was the precursor to the secret being revealed. I got the mechanics down okay, but the scene had no "oomph". It was lifeless. The most dramatic part landed with a thud. 

I'm going through the motions, which does not make for a novel anyone would want to read. I try to tell myself to just keep going; that I can fix things in editing, but at this rate I'll be editing forever. The novel is running out of steam. I'm finding that when a writing session does finally roll around, I'd rather do other things.

I'm thinking of using the text-to-speech option in Word to learn how truly awful the whole thing sounds. Maybe it's not as bad as I think. I've used it before, but it's so robotic-sounding, it hardly brings a story to life. I've searched for a realistic sounding free app, but apparently nothing is free.

Maybe I'm just in a funk and I'll fight my way out of it. At this point, the manuscript has turned into a serial that will never, ever end.