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Topic : Re: "Am I mixing my tenses?" She asked, scratching her head I'm very confused about tenses. I am not sure if I am mixing modifiers up or slipping from past to present. Can someone help me please, - selfpublishingguru.com

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Very short answer: no. What you've written is fine.

If you'd written "he was warming himself", this would be reasonable. The usage of "was" indicates that the event is occuring in the past, so there's no need to use "warmed" (indeed, that would be considered incorrect).

All you've done is drop the "he was", since this is already established by "he lit a fire". "Stooping" works similarly. Since the sentence structure makes clear that "stooping", "he lit a fire" and "warming himself" take place at the same time, the past tense form is only needed for one of them.

You could, for example, also have said "He stooped, lighting the fire, warming himself and drinking from the bottle" or "Stooping, lighting the fire and warming himself, he drank from the bottle". (Mind you, from a stylistic point of view, I'm glad you didn't.)

Have a look here, if you're still unsure: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Past_progressive


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