The Devil and your soul scenario over a game of chess…and I thought the fiddle competition was a sucker’s bet. A great idea and for the most part nicely told…

…but the tense change just killed it. It’s past, then it’s all in the present, then it’s back to past tense. Don’t do that. What it does is disrupt the suspension of disbelief required for your reader to connect to the story. You violate the internal reality of the story by switching tenses, which is jarring and boots the reader right back out of the experience of the narrative and back to reality.

Oops. Keeping tenses consistent is something I’ve been trying to work on. And here are the stories that go before (http://ficly.com/stories/3719) and after (http://ficly.com/stories/1816).