Here's a blast from the past. Back in 2008, I wrote an essay called, "The Journey of a Thousand Miles," about the publication history of the Legion of Super-Heroes for the 50th Anniversary of the team. It was published in that year's Comic-Con International Souvenir Book, and now you can read it, too!

There's more to the story than that, though. The essay was three thousand words long and instead of just sending it in when I was done, I held onto it in case I wanted to change anything later. Time often gives perspective, and if you don't have to hand in an assignment for a while, it's always better to hang onto it.

So that's what I did. Then one day a bell went off in the back of my head. The deadline must be soon, I thought, so I checked. It was the next day. I hadn't thought about the article in a long time, but like an alarm clock, some internal mechanism alerted me to the encroaching deadline.

Then I noticed something else: the essay had to be 1,500 words. I had written twice that. I had less than one day to literally cut my essay in half.

Here's what I learned: it's amazing how quickly and clearly you can see what has to stay and what can afford to go when a gun is put to your head. I took an axe to my precious writing and stripped it to the bone. Only the facts remained: there was no room for impressions, conjecture, or subtlety. I told the publication history of the Legion of Super-Heroes from Adventure to Action to Superboy to their own title(s), and I did it in under 1,500 words.

Hope you like it!

I wrote about some of my experiences of waiting to hear back from magazines and publishers over at The Millions recently. If you click the screen grab, you can read it, too!