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I've tried to read present-tense novels, and I can't. What I get out of them is less immediacy and more confusion. And I'm talking well-regarded books written by professional writers here, people who should be doing an excellent job of it. If that's what the best can do, I do not want to dream of the worst.
In the case of fanfic, as bad as present tense is, there's something worse: the more typical fanfic that can't stick with a tense. It starts out a sentence in present tense, shifts to past, and then back to present, leaving the reader with a serious case of whiplash.
IMO, someone should be a top-notch writer in a conventional sense before they try something like present tense, and when they do, they should stick with it. It may have its place (though possibly not for me) but that place is definitely not somewhere whipsawing between past and present as the author's mood (or command of the language) dictates.
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