Charlottesville Words

• HOWTO live in a schoolbus – Boing Boing
  This was all the rage when I was a kid, for many of the same economic reasons. Good times!
• The Elegant Variation: Present-Tense Fiction Redux
  Joshua Henkin (Matrimony) is blogging up a storm as a guest on TEV. I can't keep up! But I did catch this post on the problem with present tense: "…despite the fact that present tense seems to lend a piece of fiction greater immediacy, I've often found …that the present-tense stories are among the least immediate-feeling. I offered some possible reasons for this, most notably that writers who don't have any actual narrative action/forward movement in their stories use present tense to give an artificial sense of immediacy–to give the illusion that something is happening when in fact it isn't. In that regard, I talked about the use of the habitual present tense. 'She goes to the store' can mean she goes to the store on Tuesday or it can mean she is an habitual store-goer. One thing I was arguing is that a lot of present-tense writers overuse the habitual present tense such that their stories don't end up taking place in real time, and in scene."

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