All It Took to Get That Scene Published Was 23 Years
Author Michael Kardos shares how it took him 23 years to get a specific scene published in the right novel.
My first novel attempt, written back in 2002, chronicled the rise and fall of a hard-rock band as told from the perspective of their soundman. As a longtime drummer, I believed I could put some authentic details into a story like that.
It never got published.
Still, I always liked it, or at least I liked parts of it, and the part I liked best went like this: When the band was at its highest point, they spawned a tribute band. The “original band” was honored, at first. But gradually a terrible, ironic thing happened—the tribute band became more successful than the original band.
Things come to a head on a cold winter’s night, when the original band finally goes to watch their own tribute’s performance, paying the cover charge to see what all the fuss is about. Here’s what they learn, to their horror: Their tribute is better than they are.
Naturally, there’s only one thing for the now-mortified guys in the original band to do about it—make a terrible scene. And in the upside-down world of fiction, a “terrible scene” for the characters is often a very good scene for the reader. For me, the “band-meets-its-own-tribute” scene epitomized the absurdity, heartbreak, and unintentional comedy that goes along with devoting one’s life fully to rock and roll—which happened to have been my own single-minded pursuit for much of my 20s.
I came to believe that the novel was better off not getting published. Still, that one scene always felt true and right. Every once in a while, I’d dust it off for a reading, and it always went over well—especially with musicians. In the years that followed, I rewrote the scene as a standalone short story and, between the years 2004 and 2007, submitted it to a handful of magazines and garnered an equal handful of rejections. The story shouldn’t have gotten published either. It didn’t work. Without the novel’s context, the gravitas was missing. And without the gravitas, the humor didn’t hit the same way. (You can’t have cosmic irony without the cosmos.)
I revised it more, considered sending it out to more magazines, then changed my mind. I even briefly considered revising the long-dormant novel again just so that one scene could finally have a home. Between the years 2002 and 2019, I published three novels and approximately 30 short stories—but not that one scene.
During lockdown in 2020, I got the idea for a new book. During that strange, fear-filled time, I found comfort in the novels of Donald Westlake—particularly his comic heists about a criminal crew run by a man named Dortmunder. Westlake’s novels were sharp, well-written, and the best kind of hilarious: comedy born of character. And amid all this heist-reading, I thought: A down-and-out rock band would make the perfect criminal crew. These are guys who know one another like brothers, guys who are desperate and broke and already used to everything going wrong.
With this in mind, I started writing the novel that would eventually become Fun City Heist, which comes out this December. It’s about a band, Sunshine Apocalypse, that reunites 12 years after their disastrous breakup, for one last gig—to rob the venue on its busiest night of the year.
Naturally, I needed to create the band’s backstory—and not just any backstory. I needed the perfect, awful scene to encapsulate the humiliating, darkly comic slide into musical obscurity.
Bingo.
Of course, it wasn’t simply a matter of plug-and-play. Since its initial rendition in the soundman novel, I had revised the scene countless times over many years, and I revised it more now—not only the details but the voice. My 80s-era hair-band soundman was a very different character from the new novel’s ex-drummer narrator, with different ways of viewing the world and describing what they saw. But the scene’s essence, and many of its key details, hadn’t changed at all.
When my editor at Severn House first accepted the novel, she made a point to mention her favorite scene in the book. Guess which it was?
Yep. The scene when Sunshine Apocalypse finally meets its own tribute, Sunshine Apocalypse Mania.
This is all meant to be encouraging, by the way. I fear it might come across as less-than-optimistic. Publishing that scene took you nearly a quarter of a century! you might say, and you’d be right. But it ended up where it should have, in the right book, at the right time. My “band-faces-its-own-tribute scene” was like a nice sofa that needed to find the right living room. I’ve done this sort of thing before—most writers have—salvaging some good bit from a failed story or novel and finding it a newer, better home. What made this time unique for me was how long it took, and how much I continued to believe in the scene despite all the rejections.
Sometimes a “no” only really means “not yet.” Or “not in that form.”
Sometimes it only means, “Patience, my friend.”
Check out that scene in Michael Kardos' Fun City Heist here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
