Well, the die is cast. I just purchased a 2014 Mini from the refurb store. It’s the middle-range configuration, 2.6 GHz, Core i5, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD.
No horror tales about that particular year/configuration, please! Let me enjoy a few days of the warm glow of anticipation. 
Thanks again to all who chimed in here. It was a very helpful conversation. Stay tuned for boneheaded newbie questions, sure to follow.
Been there-done that-bought the T-Shirt, wore it in bed and burned a hole in it with post-coitial cigarette. Know where y’re coming from, dutch. 
did a search for
2.6ghzcorei58gbram1tbhdd
and was directed here:
abduct.com
Probably nothing to worry about … so, Happy Macing 
Take care
Vic
Thanks, Vic!
That’s a fine machine, especially for writing. Do your future self a favor and buy an external USB3 drive, somewhere north of 1.5 terabytes in size. Use it as your Time Machine backup. Hard drives fail (especially the ones with moving parts, which that one certainly has), and you’ll wish you had a backup that was current as of the last hour before the crash.
Thanks for the tip, rdale. I’ll likely do something along those lines. I need to get acquainted with the whole Time Machine concept.
‘ere y’ go dutch
one of the best time machines ever built
Here’s the manual:
Thanks, Vic. 
Wait till they get a load of me and my Mac in 1880’s Montana.
Careful y’ don’t meet y’self coming back
Take care
vic
Just to complicate things a little further (for those of us without access to a Tardis) - Time Machine is great for those occasions when you’ve deleted a Scrivener project by mistake, or want to recapture a passage you wrote several versions back. For when your entire hard disk decides to go south for its holidays, and you want to get restarted quickly - not quite so much. Then something like SuperDuper (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html) becomes invaluable - for instance by updating a bootable clone of your HDD every 48 hours on a partition of that external USB3 drive that Robert has recommended.
Thanks for that recommendation, Hugh. I’ll take a good look at it.
Are you sure you’re not a Time Lord, because things were pretty simple until you arrived. 
Time machine is the dead-simple backup strategy. I haven’t had a new mac without Time Machine running on it for a few years, but if I recall correctly, you plug in the external hard drive, your Mac says “you wanna use this for Time Machine backups, pal?” You say, “yeah, sure”, and it takes care of the rest.
It may not be the most efficient at getting you up and running in an instant, but with the speed of USB3 (do pay extra for the USB3 drive vs USB2), it won’t be nearly as bad has it was for so many years. So if you don’t want to get all timey-wimey-complicatey, you can stick with it and your recovery time will be better than if you didn’t have anything.
Thanks rdale. I’ve been reading up on Time Machine (the Mini doesn’t arrive until tomorrow), and it does indeed sound drop-dead simple. I’m used to fairly rudimentary back-up procedures, so it’ll be an improvement. One question–does the external drive used for the Time Machine backup have to be dedicated solely to the Time Machine, or can I use it for other things as well?
I think you can store files on the drive alongside the backup. You’ll need a really big drive (the backup should have at least 1.5 times the capacity of your internal).
You could also partition the drive so there’s dedicated Time Machine space (at least 1.5 times the size of your internal drive), and leave the rest for external storage of files you don’t care about losing if the external fails. Disk Utility is pretty easy to use for this purpose.
Thanks, rdale. It occurred to me after I asked the question that I will likely never get close to filling the Mini’s 1TB HDD, so any questions about storing stuff elsewhere are purely academic. I do plan to get a 2TB drive for the Time Machine.
I’ve got a 4 TB external drive partitioned so that half of it is a Time Machine volume and the other half is the CrashPlan backup for other machines in the house. As long as the Time Machine volume is big enough, OS X doesn’t care what it’s sharing the physical drive with.
However, I wouldn’t recommend putting the Time Machine volume on the same physical drive as your data volume. Kind of defeats the purpose, as if the physical drive fails both your data and the backup are at risk.
Katherine
Thanks, Katherine. That makes sense.
Today’s the day. The dog and I are on UPS-truck watch.
For what it’s worth - I have two external hard disks which I partition 50 per cent for Time Machine* and 50 per cent for a SuperDuper clone, and which I rotate roughly every six weeks between my son’s home and mine. So, unless the HDD of my Mac Mini and the two external hard disks all fail more or less at the same time, I’ll always have Time Machine versions and a bootable copy of my hard disk available that are a maximum of six weeks out of date. (Not my scheme, but that of Joe Kissell, author of Backing Up Your Mac).
Overkill, possibly, but one’s judgment on this should probably depend on the financial and/or sentimental value one places on the contents of one’s hard disk.
*When Time Machine reaches the limits of the partition, it starts to delete earlier stuff. Mine is currently deleting 2012, which gives me more than three years of “versions”. That’s good enough for me.
Thanks, Hugh. All good info!
The machine arrived yesterday. I’m getting acclimated and enjoying myself. I’ve not downloaded Scrivener yet and tried pulling up my PC Scriv projects. That’s this morning’s project.
OK, we already know I’m a cheapskate, so this question will not come as a shock. Since I’ve already paid for the PC version of Scrivner, is there a discount available for my purchase of the Mac version? I see mentions of said discount, but I can’t seem to find a link to it.