Source: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb.
"He's trash!" my oldest friend, Allison, says after I tell her the story from my bed before my son wakes up.
I can't translate in Croatian: after + present
In Croatian is always: after + past
after I told her the story
after I have told her story
After I had told her story
etc
Can you explain that After + present in English?
There are three possible uses of "after I tell."
1) Habitual action:
After I tell my daughter a bedtime story, I brush my teeth => Every night, I tell my daughter a bedtime story and then, after that, I brush my teeth.
2) Part of a sentence in the future tense:
After I tell her the story, she will fall asleep => I will tell her the story and then she will fall asleep.
In English, we indicate the future tense by using the modal verb will or shall and then the verb's "bare infinitive" (the infinitive without "to"). So, in this case, "tell" is actually not present tense, but bare infinitive.
3) Historical/narrative present:
After I tell her the story, she falls asleep => I told her the story and then she fell asleep.
The historical present is used to describe actions in the past, but uses the present tense, perhaps to make the narration sound more lively.
>symbol at the beginning of each line you're quoting, it'll create a so-called blockquote, which visually sets off the quotation from the rest of the text (press the return key twice after the text to get out of the blockquote). Finally, in Croatian you can say ...she says after I tell her X: (informally) nakon što ja njoj kažem X, ona meni kaže..., and the effect is the same as in English: it makes the past seem more interactive ("lively" as the answerer says).<br>isn't the same thing) because this code (i.e.(^[ \t]*>[ \t]?.+\n(.+\n)*\n*)+) doesn't care about<br>s, only newlines (which you can safely assume haven't been replaced by<br>s because otherwise they wouldn't be looking for them), as you can see. Alternatively, you can use<blockquote> ... </blockquote>if you're really into writing HTML for some reason.