December 2013, I think it was when I came across a recruiting stage for a Wattpad Smackdown. The details intrigued me, so I thought ... what the hell? I'll give this a go ... and so I did. It went on for the most part of 2014.

I enjoyed taking part in this Smackdown and I also liked what I wrote though I knew I would need to return to that story to improve it, make it more coherent. For this project I had written 24,000 words which went unedited for a long time. Prompts were left in and so on.

Yeah, I really enjoyed the tale and I looked forward to returning to it to see what I could do with it. However, as time went on, the tale I wrote went to the back of the pile of projects I wanted to try ... until the time eventually came to do something with a story left in purgatory to gather dust.

November is one of my favourite months of the year as it is a month set aside for NaNoWriMo. If you don't know what that is, then please go investigate. I have been writing since 1986, and what I wrote for a very long time were short stories. I had wanted to write longer ones but never felt motivated enough to get there so in 2011 I took on NaNoWriMo and it aided me in writing one tale in excess of 50,000 words in one month.

That story written in November of 2011 has been worked on in the years since and I am delighted to say it is now fully complete and edited, if only I could say the same for that Smackdown story.

I have enjoyed NaNoWriMo over the leads so in the lead up to November 2021, I began to consider what I might do for this year's event ... then it hit me ... that Smackdown story I wrote in 2014 ... if I don't return to it at this time then I may not actually ever return to it.

Thing is, I should have kept better track of a word count, for I deleted sentences and paragraphs from that original 24,000-word story so thinking I had a starting point of 24,000 words I actually didn't ... but what the hell? What mattered is that I got this story to a place to a point where I can leave it be, happy in the knowledge that it will be or is as good as it will ever be.

So here it is ... that Smackdown story re-visited, improved, extended, and complete ... if you give it a read, I hope you find it entertaining. It was certainly fun for me ... will it be fun for you?