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

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I rarely enjoy reading books written in present tense and I can think of very few indeed where the present tense has actually enhanced my experience of a book. It draws attention to itself in a way that past tense narrative, because it is so much more common, does not.

But far better write in present tense than not at all.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Also, I remember once reading a fic written in future tense which worked surprisingly well. It had a nice sort of day-dreamlike quality. But I think that would be extremely hard to pull off in a longer story.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I could see that being a beautiful thing for a story from, say, Luna's POV, but yes, very hard!

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I agree with all of this. Though I have read a few books and stories and suddenly realised that I had not realised they were in the present tense, which indicates the presence of an expert in the form. None, alas, were by me ;-) (I jest, but I did once pick up a book of short stories from my university days and find myself really enjoying one of them, eagerly looked up the writer, and was then torn between being appalled at my rampant egoism and appalled at my appalling memory ...)

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha!!!!

And I expect you're right about experts being able to pull it off without readers even noticing. I am not one of those.