There may yet be some old stagers around who read this post when it went up years ago. I was reminded of it - specifically the question of tense - while reading Philip Pullman today; he shares my view but expresses it rather better than I did:
"[...] many fine writers have written many admirable books in the present tense. But I can't make it work. The present tense is like those Venetian blinds that, instead of having horizontal slats, have vertical ones. I don't like being in a room that has those blinds because you can only look up and down. But life isn't vertical, life is horizontal. Friends and neighbours and cats and dogs and cars and the postman come along the road, not down from the sky. The present tense is like that: what it gives you is a vertical slice across a horizontal life."
From Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling.
