Bob's stomach gurgled and he wondered if he should have checked the sell-by date of his lunch. You could never be too careful with chicken.

Not great, but gets past the past-perfect (which at times you do need, but it's best to use sparingly) Find out what life's really like in Spain. Please visit my blog: Tales from La Terraza

I gave this to someone else once and they LOVED it. They said it helped them a lot.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_tensec.html

I haven't taken a look at your writing yet so I'm not sure what the "tense" issue is but I've noticed in a lot of writing the constant changing of the tense:

i.e. "It was and had been a long stormy night and as Dr. Moroe sits in his chair reading it wasn't long before he dozed off."

As you can see, the sentence incorporates both past (was, wasn't, dozed) and present tense (sits, reading) and is also passive (had been).

When I come across this in my reviews I try to point them out and then suggest the person find the tense they want and then stick with it. It can be quite challenging to those who can't seem to find the way they want the story to come across.

This is another good website to help you with tenses.

http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/simplepresent.html

There are exercises you can do and study. Unfortunately, you're going to have to do this a lot so you can easily spot goof ups in your own writing. But don't feel bad. Even the most famous of authors do it every once in a while. A great book I read that is written in first person, present tense is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Not only is it a great story but you'll really get a great feel to writing in first person present tense and what it looks like when done well. Quite frankly, I suck at 1st person/present but others really like it.

I hope these links help you.



Jen

"There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts." Charles Dickens

First off, there's nothing wrong with that. Alternatives would include:

"Bob ate chicken for lunch and then wondered if he should have checked the best-before date"

Or (just tidying away that slightly cumbersome past continuous): "Bob had eaten chicken for lunch and wondered now if he should have checked the best before date first."

English tenses are a beast. For what it's worth, they were never properly taught, even back in the sixties when I was terrorised by perverts in black gowns. It wasn't until years later, when I had a brief gig teaching English as a foreign language, that I had to sit down and get to grips with this stuff. I learned, among other things, that there are actually about half a dozen future tenses in English, which came as a complete shock.

My favourite discovery was the distinction between the past perfect and the simple past. The former describes an event that occurred in the past, but within a time-slot that still continues. The latter an event that occurred in the past, within a time-slot that has now ended.

Confused? Assume that your postman normally delivers in the morning. Up till noon, you would ask, "Has the post come?" But after noon the question becomes "Did the post come?"

I love the clarity of the past perfect (pluperfect) -- the way it tidies events away into a removed past. But it can get a bit formal and cumbersome, and I think it should be avoided if possible. Just see if a sentence works just as well without it (in the simple past); if so, drop it...