User blog comment:Bocaj910/A First Look At TDL - The Novel/@comment-1874924-20101009035844

You've got a good start, Bocaj. The only criticism I'll make here is that, as I noted in the Writer's Workshop I hosted back in April, I don't recommend mixing past tense and present tense in narrative. (Dialogue has different ground rules.) It looks like this is supposed to be a past tense narrative, so it would be easier to change the present tense bits.

Mixing tenses is something I have to watch out for in my own story, because the finished scenes are in past tense, but my notes tend to be in present tense. Could this be the cause of your stray present tense bits, as well?