Yes, I know I’m late, and I profusely apologize to both of my readers. This time I have decent excuses. Well, whether they’re decent or not I’ll leave to the reader’s judgement, but I’ve been settling in some new livestock and learning a lot from them, I’ve been working like a dog at the Mini-Barn for one-hour stretches wherever I can fit the time in and my weekends have been turned upside down, last weekend by some sort of stomach bug and this weekend by a birthday party.

I also have some sort of progress to report and a brief glimpse of how I’m setting up Scrivener for the first Black Box Factory story which will at least start out with a different name.

N-ewe Recruits.

So, a little backstory.

We’ve been planning to get lambs for over a year now. The original plan was to get them from a well known local supplier earlier this year in the Spring. Then we were given a potential contact to buy from who, from March until the end of June was less than motivated in making a sale. I spoke to her on, I think, 28 June, and when I pointed out that her intended date for us to collect the lambs was 4th of July, she said she’d see if we could collect them on the Monday or Tuesday prior to that and get back to me.

Crickets.

So, after much fluffing about and getting myself convinced that we could contain, feed, water and protect lambs, I contacted the well known local supplier who has a good reputation and likes to do business – sell me something I want, I’ll give you cash – and lo’ and behold, we have lambs, three for the price we were anticipating spending on two.

Regrading. Can You Dig it?

You might recall me mentioning the mini-barn in previous posts, especially my admission that “I did a terrible job grading for the mini-barn” and the plan was to use a mini-excavator to fix it.

Well, that didn’t work out too well, mostly because there’s no way to get a mini-excavator into the barn to move the dirt around, so the new plan is to have fill dirt delivered – done – and use slave labor (me) to shovel and shift it from a big pile fifty feet away to where it needs to be in the mini-barn.

It’s hard work.

Black Box Factory and Scrivener.

On Friday, once I’d completed the one hour I could give to the Pre-Beta edit effort – I try to break things into one hour chunks, that way I can work on everything while all projects fall behind equally – I took a break to investigate how I’d set up Scrivener for the initial draft of Black Box Factory when the stars finally align and I can get on with it.

I hadn’t done anything.

It was all on Trello.

Well that was great because at least I hadn’t lost anything. Well, nothing much.

So I took a few minutes to set up Scrivener with the basics of what the outline might look like, adding in some characters and color coding, and here it is.

I like it, not least because I’ve color coded it so I can instantly see the role of the characters, locations etc., and not only because it gives me an insight into how enormous this project is going to be in comparison to – what is currently known as – The Old Man, but because it’s a motivator. I want to get on with it RIGHT NOW!!!

Of course, I can’t. There’s too much else to do.

Incidentally, the working title for this first Black Box Factory story will be ‘Lock Out, Tag Out.’

Up Next…

Well, since the weekend got turned upside down and shaken by a birthday party, nothing got done and it’s all slid over into today, which would normally be a Girl Scouts day, but there’s even more stuff that needs doing instead of even that. So, it’s pretty much all buggered.

I’m currently at 64% of the way through the Pre-Beta edit on Chapter 10, so if this week evens out there’s a good chance I’ll close that out by Friday and be able to prep for Betas. No promises there, though.

Other than that, it’s 11:43 on a Monday morning. I’d normally be stopping for lunch, but the washing machine and drier have both signaled they’re impatient for me to get back to work, so the quality of this post is going to be a warts-and-all initial unrevised draft.

I hope everyone has a great week and, if the gods are willing, next Monday my post won’t just be about how I’ve finished the Pre-Beta edit and have my thoughts on bringing The Old Man into Scrivener (lessons learned and things I wish I’d thought of at the beginning rather than part way through) but also be released on time!

Till then stay safe.

Categories: Black Box Factory, Lock Out Tag Out, Scrivener, Sheep, The Old Man, Work Update

Tags: Black Box Factory, Ewe, Lambs, Lock Out Tag Out, Mini Barn, Regrading, Scrivener