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I find that I have trouble maintaining tense consistency throughout a story.  I can manage to use the proper tenses in a sentence and have that part agree, but as a story goes on, I find I often waffle between present and past tense.  Does anyone else have this problem?  Or does anyone else have advice on how to improve on this?  I admit that it's one of the few things I struggle with in writing, apart from memorizing the spelling of some words; sometimes I really hate the English language...even if it's the only one I speak/write.

Just keep reading and writing CYOAs until one day you pick up a book and discover that past tense feels awkward and unnatural.

I really struggle with writing anything in third person/past tense these days and have the same slip ups you're describing, just in the opposite direction.

Alright.  I guess I'm just worried that my tense issues will put people off of my writing while I'm trying to sort out the bugs.  It really is a different way to write than your typical third or first person prose.  Maybe I'll just get the ideas out and worry about tense later, but I find that my brain won't let it go that easily.  As I'm writing I feel like I have to keep asking myself if I'm using the right tense, which means I have to look at what I've already written on all pages to figure it out.  Or something.  Don't mind me; I have a cold and my thinking isn't at its best.

The most important thing is just to get the story out in a rough state. Proofreading and edits can come later, and that part's much faster than agonizing over the details and second guessing yourself constantly as you write.

As far as the contests go, do most people reading them recognize the time constraints, or are most of you practiced enough to get a more finished piece done within a month?

If the time constraints or any other handicap were an obvious factor I'll acknowledge that in the review, but as far as actual ratings go I stick to a ruthlessly objective standard regardless of what's been published or why or if the author's age is in the single digits. I don't know how other people do it, everyone's got their own method I suppose.

Part of the challenge of a timed competition is in coming up with a plot you know you can knock out before the deadline. I've been historically bad at this and my traditional process has been just publishing half a story with a tacked on ending at the last second to avoid points lost and SHAME. (and then immediately unpublishing it after the judging on account of normal, lower cased shame.)

Since I've just come back, I'm not up on all the local slang and nuances.  What is SHAME as opposed to shame? :)

Oh that.

If you fail to produce an eligible entry, Endmaster will throw you and the rest of the failures into a pit of SHAME that can only be escaped by managing an entry for another, different contest. Here is the last one.

The drive to not be crammed into an imaginary hole with other CYStians is a strong one, yet every contest more entrants than not still wind up there, alas.

Ah, interesting.  There's a good chance I won't finish, but I definitely won't if I don't try, right? :)  But I can't afford to feel shame over it, so hopefully it'll just run off me like water off a duck's back.