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Mike,
I commend you for prioritizing your health and recovery. Your novella will always be here for you (it may even grow through your experience). I appreciate you telling us--I've been checking in with The Ancients. It's an interesting premise, but I can wait to read it until it's the right time for it to be written. 
Good health and good prayers/thoughts to you.
Hi all,
For what it's worth, I worked as an SAT tutor for a few years, and this exact problem was used to trip up students regarding subject/verb agreement. The people creating the test knew that a singular subject containing multiple units (e.g. "a couple") would sound best with a plural verb. And then they would ding students for the wrong answer. So just tossing that out there--the SAT would say that since the subject is singular (it doesn't matter what comes after the subject, "a couple of _______," because the "of ________ " just modifies the singular subject), the verb must match. They call these words "collective nouns." So we can take or leave that.
As for the second discussion--how right do we need to be?--I would say it comes down to the voice of your narrator. Obviously, if you're writing in 1st-person, you've already considered the voice of your narrator, including the formality and precision of their speech. But even in 3rd-person, the voice is critical. So for me, personally, it's not necessarily about what sounds right or what is right. It's about who is telling the story and how to best capture their voice.
Cheers!
Hi TirzahLaughs,
Both can be correct, but here's the catch: you must pick one and stick with it throughout.
First, you have to decide if your narrator is telling the reader a story that has already passed (this is usually a framed story, where the narrator makes it clear at the beginning that they are going to tell you about something that happened, e.g. "It all started on my tenth birthday...") or if the reader is walking alongside the narrator through the story. Both are valid narrative structures. In the first case, use past tense. In the second case, use the present tense. And never vacillate in between.
To use the example from this thread:
"So, I slapped him silly when I found out and he got mad and jumped in his car. I'm flipping him the bird while he's driving away staring..."
The issue is "slapped" is past tense, while "I'm (am) flipping" is present tense.
It could be:
"So, I slap him silly when I find out and he gets mad and jumps in his car. I'm flipping him the bird while he's driving away staring..."
-or-
"So, I slapped him silly when I found out and he got mad and jumped in his car. I flipped him the bird while he drove away staring..."
Good luck untangling!
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