Where's your head at?

You know you've been working too hard when you forget writing a 5000 word short story. A few months back American publisher Moonstone Books announced plans to publish an anthology of short stories featuring costumed hero The Phantom. The Phantom's been fighting injustice, tyranny and piracy for 70 years and is often known as The Ghost Who Walks. [There's a not bad 1996 film version, starring Billy Zane and Catherine Zeta-Jones before she went global.] Anyways, I write Phantom comics for Egmont Sweden and have tried several times to get a toe in the door at Moonstone, which has the licence to publish Phantom comics in the US.

So I pitched three short story ideas for the anthology. All got nixed for various reasons, so I tried another tack and that was accepted. This is where things get hazy. Yesterday I got an email from Moonstone saying King Features Syndicate, copyright-holders for The Phantom, had approved my story. Great, I thought, and emailed back to Moonstone asking when I needed to deliver the text. Today I get a reply - I've already written the story. It was submitted at the start of July. That's what KFS had approved, although there would still be some copy edits to follow.

Somehow my work-addled brain had managed to forget writing a 5000 word short story. But there it was, sitting inside my computer's memory. The good news the story will be fresh as a daisy when the time comes for me to tweak it, ensuring plenty of objectivity. The bad news is the state of my head if I can forget writing a 5000 word short story! Is there a novel somewhere on my hard drive that I've blanked out?