Quick poll

[blamebrampton]

[Poll #1633332]In other news, HAPPY BIRTHDAY samena  and eanelinea77 ! May your days be excellent and filled with visits from the gift fairies and cake pixies!

And if anyone else out there is out of their tiny little minds with overwork: Agatha Christie, complex geometry, red lip gloss and slightly complicated knitting are all decent stopgaps until your brain has time to recover. One week, and I will be off having an adventure with no one expecting me to rescue anyone else's demented prose! If I am tremendously dilligent, I can even get a good lot of writing done and be a step closer to never editing again.

Well, never editing anything not written by friends or interesting fandom people, at any rate ...

Comments

[vaysh11.livejournal.com]

Great poll! :) My take on present tense is that you need a very good reason for using it in a long fic. And I don't mean some stylistic-experiment reason, but a reason that has to do with plot and characterisation.

My fave example for a long fanfic written in present tense that works is "Things That Change": even though the plot covers more than two decades, the focus is on intimate things like sex and the physical changes due to pregnancy, birth and illness. The present tense works here to sustain an intimacy and immediacy that I doubt would have come across quite as intensely if written in past tense.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Very true! I used it in Sins because it was from the POV of a five-year old at the start: I think I have had trouble finishing Fathers because it is not as natural coming from a fortysomething (which also explains the large number of explosions in that fic).

I think the basic problem is that my brain is broken, but deadlines are not!