Character Intimacy

I had tried in The Cafe to create a kind of timeless, somewhat myth/folktale inspired atmosphere. Those of you who've read it will understand what I mean. And maybe I achieved that too much, as I was talking yesterday about it and received the feedback that anyone could have written it, it's not very personally about me. (well...it is and isn't) But I understand what this friend was getting at because I had started to feel the same about my new story...that I'm not close enough to the characters.

I feel like the pronoun use, as well as of proper names, holds them at arms length away from me. Which is not my intention, I want to be in these characters skin, in their thoughts and feelings.
I think I achieved this better in my scifi story about Mireille.

Hopefully some of you who've read both Mireille and The Cafe could chime in on this.

I think I've been , in the last several years, holding myself back in the fiction writing process. Not really letting all of me inform it for fear of making the people close to me uncomfortable when reading it. Or trying too hard to emulate a favorite author.
This is a good opportunity, now in my life, to try a new approach, a more true approach.