This week’s biggest accomplishment has been getting ready to go and get the lambs, hopefully this upcoming week. I really had no idea what I was doing and wound up getting five cattle panels from the local farmer’s co-op, which their worker and I loaded into the back of our truck.

It was a little unnerving to have these things in the 7-ft bed, secured in place only by my knot-tying handiwork, but we made it.

The next task was fabricating a containment cage that could be fitted in the back of the truck and removed when not needed. Not a particularly taxing task, but here’s what I came up with after a couple of hours and finally breaking in my new 4.5″ angle grinder.

As you can see, the whole thing fit very neatly into the bed of the truck, which wasn’t by design since I didn’t have any control over where the panel cross-bars – to give them a name – might be.

The whole thing is fixed together with UV resistant zip ties, so a little bit of sun shouldn’t result in the entire contraption falling apart. It’s all held in by four d-rings, two secured at the front, two at the rear.

One thing that I changed from my original idea was the gate. I’d originally planned on two gates, one opening to the left, the other to the right, but the dear wife suggested that having it open toward the top would make it easier to keep the first lamb in the back of the truck while we load the second because the gate would automatically close, thanks to gravity. So, I swapped out the larger gate to open toward the top, but kept the smaller one opening to the left so it can be used to hold the main gate open, if that’s what I want.

The Old Man Update…

I do at least know where my Alpha reader was in the story last Monday, so I can say a little something of how it is working out. I’d planned that the story should be engaging but make it difficult to initially establish either the time period it was set in or, more aggravatingly, who the main protagonist was. This part of the plan seems to have worked out, because she’s one chapter away from finding that one of the main characters will be playing no further role in the story.

Black Box Factory…

It’s taking a lot longer than I’d expected to collate my notes as I work my way through the initial research phase. I might have developed a better understanding of the time required if I’d kept some notes about starting The Old Man. The concept came to me three Christmases ago and although the story was quite simple and didn’t need major research, I still needed to have a good idea of the structure of domestic service, the essence of the lifestyle and an fair notion of the pay etc. The Black Box Factory world is a lot larger, a lot more complicated and simply outlining in the broadest, roughest sense is going to be a challenge, even with decent research.

Up Next…

As an author, I’m still stuck on the same theme here for at least the next few weeks. I’m unable to proceed with The Old Man just yet, and I need to finish collating my Black Box Factory notes – right now, I’m only about 30% through…

In what passes for my life away from the realities of writing, I need to get a sun shade built for the lambs today (Monday, blog publishing day) as we could hear any day that we can go get our two lambs. There’s a bunch of other time vampires coming up, but I shan’t bore you with those. I’m lucky you’ve stuck around this long!

Hopefully next week, then, I’ll either have pictures of our two new lambs out grazing and settling in, or another short post detailing how much further I’ve made it through my Black Box Factory research notes.

Or some lame excuses.

Till then, have a great week!

Categories: Alpha Reader, Black Box Factory, Research, Sheep, The Old Man, Work Update