[UPDATE] On the virtues of pre-readers

So I've already acknowledged the upcoming next chapter of Empire is going to be quite a bit longer than my usual. There's a scene that I was sincerely worried about writing it right. I needed to write a character that suddenly got massively and unexpectedly, even to them, OP. Problem is when you know everything that happens, you tend to not realize when you're not telling everything that needs to be told to properly show what's going on to the reader.

Time to tangent for a moment: There are two basic types of third-person perspective writing, third-person omniscient and third-person limited. I'm choosing to write Empire as a series of third-person limited, which means that while there are many, many things that I could write to explain the sudden OP, they all involve the reader knowing more than the character. This is a fundamental no-no of third-person limited.

So I wrote the scene up and showed it to my pre-reader (who's not happy with having his heart squeezed in the vice of my deeply depressing story but can't seem to get enough of it), and while he understood the purpose of the scene, he advised that he didn't understand why the character was suddenly Jet Li re-incarnated.

Clearly, some work needs doing to make this thing really pop.

It's not going to add any appreciable time to get the chapter out (though I am going with an "it's done when it's done" "deadline" on this one), but I thought I'd let y'all know what the sitch' was.