Tense issues?

[ejordan]

Hello all,
I am an amateur writer beginning some experimentation to hopefully embark on writing a novel. However, as i begun the process, I hit an unexpected snag regarding tense.

Let me first provide you with a sample:

"The heat-haze dance of abandoned overpasses in the Echyron desert was like a hallucination from the zone’s psychotropic flora, contorted broken spires of highway concrete rising out of the sand like severed snakes, cobalt necks gaping wide with rebar spikes and bleeding stalactites of some protective water sealant developed in the 20th century. Now, in the wake of all that had transpired in the millennium marking The Expansion, there was no water to seal against, at least not in this zone. Not in these coordinates. Not in this place once called Borneo."

Am I shifting tenses when i go from using "was" to using "these" and "this"?
Its just that "This" and "These" seem to have an immediacy to them that "was" does not.

Much appreciation for anyone who can help....
-Eric

[Teresa Edgerton]

"Was" is a verb (the past tense singular, first and third person, of the verb "to be"). "This" and "these" are demonstrative pronouns and they have no tenses. You might choose to use "that" and "those" to create a sense of distance, but it wouldn't be a distance in time, and whether that distancing would be appropriate would depend on which point-of-view you are writing in: first, second, or third person.