Team Crit

A friend asked me the other day if I'd got my Crit team assembled yet.
A simple question, you might think, BUT, I didn't even know that they came in kit form!

Now I have extra worries...
Can I get them ready made?
Do I have to paint the pieces before I glue them together?  I hope not, they will all have axe wielding maniac smiles if I do.
Will I have to file off the little plastic knobbly bits before I glue them together?
What if I glue the wrong bit in the wrong place?  If I do, will they end up as Evil Crit Partners and try to take over the world?

I knew getting your work critted was a tough experience, but I wasn't prepared for this!

Group nouns, anyone?

I’m have to admit, I’m fascinated by collective nouns.  The way that they don’t really make any sense, but are somehow fitting.  Personally, I think that these could probably all fall under the catagory of  ‘lots’, or ‘many’ as part of my new counting idea (see previous post).

A couple of examples that amuse me are:

A murder of crows.
A gaggle of geese.
(Sorry, I’m going to have to do the joke:
Q. What’s the collective noun for Cattle?
A. Herd of cows?
Reply. Of course I’ve heard of cows, that’s what I’m asking about!)

Right, back to the original idea…
It’s got me thinking whether there are collective nouns for the writing world.  From what I can gather, there aren’t, so here’s my stab at a few:

A Pen of Authors.
A Disappointment of rejection letters.
A Forest of Manuscripts.
An Elusive of Agents.

Please feel to add your own.

Is my number up?

Is it just me, or are numbers becoming more meaningless these days?
£22 Billion of Government borrowing
The nearest star with an exo-planet is 63 trillion miles away
I have a 2 terabyte hard drive
When I dropped a cup the other day, it smashed into hundreds of pieces.
Do you read these numbers and immediately have a clear picture of the exact amount involved?  (This is where I’m hoping that you say no.)
With this in mind, I have decided to use a new numbering system:

One, two, three, lots, many.

Seriously, this is all you need.
When you come back from the shops, and realise that you’ve spent far too much, you don’t need to tell people exactly how much you spent, you just say that you’ve spent lots of money.  They’ll know exactly what you mean.
When arrive somewhere after being stuck in a traffic jam, all you need to say is that you spent many hours sitting in a jam.
Now we come to the point where you'll really appreciate the versatility of this new system.  When you feel that Lots or Many doesn’t quite do the values you are trying to convey, you can combine them:
For Christmas, I received lots and lots of presents!
There are many many reasons why I won’t visit Uncle Betty :o|

Now, I’m off to write lots of many words in my new MS.
Have a funfilled day.