Authors write in the present as if it were the past or the future. Even when they write in the present tense it's not that present. It's some other imagined present. Why don't authors write in the present? Why do they fracture time? Break its bones and rearrange them somewhere else?

Well, they have to because the present isn't interesting enough. They can think themselves out of the present in only a few sentences, and then they have to go somewhere else. The past, the future. They have to jump right out of this moment, and though having jumped out of it they remain in it, they're not writing about it; other moments, remembered, imagined. The mind can't say this is what's happening, this is what's happening now, because nothing is happening.

Things only happened or will happen. Nothing is happening. I'm writing. That's what's happening. It's nothing as far as something to write about.