BOOK FAIRS—ARE THEY WORTH IT?

Last Saturday, the Autumnal Equinox, Susan and I spent the day attending and exhibiting our wares at the Sonoma County Book Festival, in a public square in downtown Santa Rosa, California. The weather was  perfect: a bright blue sky, and the air warm but not scorching. The staff running the show were friendly and helpful. We enjoyed getting to know some of our fellow exhibitors, and it was, as always, a pleasure to show off our Perseverance Press mysteries. 

We’ve done a lot of exhibiting at trade shows and book fairs over the years. We’ve displayed at ABAs and BEAs all over the country, we participated in the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books for its first ten years. We showed at the Santa Barbara book fair, and early in our company history we even organized that event for two years running. We’ve had tables at Left Coast Crimes and Bouchercons.

Why do we do this?

It ain’t cheap. The cost of a space is substantial, and then there’s the equipment rental cost. (Oh? You wanted to put your books on a table? That’ll cost…) Plus travel expense, plus lodging.

So far we’ve never sold enough books at any book fair to make back our investment. (At the trade shows, you don’t sell any books on the floor.) I won’t tell you how many books we sold at the Sonoma County Book Festival last week, because I don’t know the number. I do know how much cash we took in, and I won’t tell you that number because I don’t want to.

But we had fun. We took turns strolling around and looking at the wares and services on display by other vendors. A lot of one-book self-publishers. Some religious cult publishers. A staff member of Pathfinder Press tried to enroll me in the Communist Party. There was a small press who specialized in books about vampires, Satan, and gore. There was a publisher of exquisitely written and illustrated children’s books; Susan bought a book from them (Barefoot Books) for one of our granddaughters.

It was our (good/bad, you decide) luck to be positioned next to a poetry slam in the midafternoon.

Most of all, we enjoyed talking to those several people who stopped by to chat about books. Our books, and books in general. And best of the best of all, occasionally after such a conversation somebody reached into a pocket and pulled out money. Books and smiles for money and smiles: an exchange remarkably like romance.

But there comes a time at every one of these events, usually late in the afternoon, when there’s a lull in the traffic and we’re tired of standing and tired of sitting and tired of smiling at looky-loo passersby, when one of us will turn to the other and say, “We’ll never do this again.”

And then somebody who was at the table hours ago will return, and buy a book, or another copy of a book she’s already bought.

And later, after we’ve packed up our wares and left the show, as we lift our glasses in a nearby bar and grill, one of us will turn to the other and say, “When we come back next year, let’s…”

A Visit with Marilyn Meredith

This post is a visit with my friend, prolific mystery author Marilyn Meredith. Marilyn has a lot to say about writing in general (where plots come from, for example), and she has a lot to tell us about Deputy Tempe Crabtree and her mountain community of Bear Creek. Marilyn Meredith has a great sense of place! And as she well knows, the most intriguing feature of any place, factual or fictitious, is its people.

So take a moment and get to know Marilyn Meredith. And if you haven’t already read her books, get busy! She has a new one out now, set in Bear Creek and featuring Deputy Tempe Crabtree.

Marilyn, I’ll turn this over to you…

Revisiting Deputy Tempe Crabtree

People often ask, “How can you keep writing about the same characters?” They are referring to the characters who inhabit the Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery series, and I have an easy answer.

Tempe, her husband, Pastor Hutch and all the people who live in the mountain community of Bear Creek are real to me. When I finish writing one book about them I begin wondering what is going to happen to them next. And the only way to find that out is to revisit them by writing the next book.

Before I begin, I often think about what was going on the last time I visited. What time of year it was and if there was anything happening that I need to find out more about. As I’m putting my mind back into Bear Creek I begin to see the town as it is with the Café, the Inn, the Fire Station, the trailer park and the cluster of low rent houses. Hutch’s church is located a bit farther up the highway.

Because life is a serious of dilemmas (at least mine seems to be) I wonder what crisis may hit Bear Creek and some of the people who live there.

Often my story telling is influenced by events that really happened to people I know. Because we had what I thought were two suspicious deaths a few years back—two friends who were found dead in their respective homes on the same morning that were determined to be from natural causes with no investigation at all—I decided Tempe should get involved in something similar.

Weather is often an important element in the mountains and since this story began to evolve a couple of weeks after Christmas, I knew an unrelenting rainstorm would not only complicate the murder investigation but also the lives of everyone living in and around Bear Creek as the river began to flood.

A non-writer may not be able to understand how exciting it is to have all the parts of a new story begin to fill your mind and then the pages of the manuscript. When I’m writing about Tempe and everyone in Bear Creek, I feel like I’m home and among friends—except for the bad guy, whoever that might be.

Want to know more about Marilyn's community of Bear Creek? Check this out!

A bit about the latest, Raging Water: Deputy Tempe Crabtree’s investigation of the murder of two close friends is complicated when relentless rain turns Bear Creek into a raging river. Homes are inundated and a mud slide blocks the only road out of Bear Creek stranding many—including the murderer.

Contest: The person who leaves comments on the most blogs will have his/her name used for a character in my next book—can choose if you want it in a Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery or a Rocky Bluff P.D. crime novel.

And now, meet the author!

Bio: Marilyn Meredith is the author of over thirty published novels, including the award-winning Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery series, the latest Raging Water from Mundania Press. Writing as F. M. Meredith, her latest Rocky Bluff P.D. crime novel is No Bells, the fourth from Oak Tree Press. Marilyn is a member of EPIC, three chapters of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and on the board of the Public Safety Writers of America. Visit her at http://fictionforyou.com and follow her blog at http://marilymeredith.blogspot.com/

I know there are some people who like to read a series in order, but let me reassure you that every book is complete. Though the characters grow through each book, the crime is always solved. Here is the order of the books for anyone who wants to know: Deadly Trail, Deadly Omen, Unequally Yoked, Intervention, Wing Beat, Calling the Dead, Judgment Fire, Kindred Spirits, Dispel the Mist, Invisible Path, Bears With Us, Raging Water.

Three Rites of Passage

Life stories are made of turning points, which in many cases are also rites of passage, those turning points that everyone in a shared culture is familiar with, either by direct experience or by common hearsay.

And since a lot of fiction is to some extent autobiographical—inspired by the authors’ own life stories and turning points—rites of passage are a common ingredient of our novels and short stories.

To illustrate this point, here are three experiences I’ve had during my life, which I call not only points of change, but also rites of passage.

1. In 1959, when I was seventeen, I had my first summer romance. I was working for a hotel in South Texas, and I fell in love with a nineteen-year-old waitress. This thrilling summer fling was a breakthrough for me. Fortunately for me, the fling ended with the summer, and nobody got in any trouble. I went off to my senior year in boarding school with some sweet memories and some bragging rights.

2. In June 2010, I attended the 50^th reunion of my class at that boarding school where I had been cheerfully incarcerated for four of my teenage years. I went to this class reunion with considerable trepidation, because I expected that all my old friends and classmates would have by this time become world leaders, academic geniuses, and powerful lawyers who drove Lexuses. I, on the other hand, had spent the past 50 years studiously underachieving. I was afraid that at this gathering I would be barely acknowledged, that I would stammer in every conversation, and I might drink too much to quell my nerves, and then I’d throw up in chapel.

Turns out I got along just fine with my old gang. The only person who was in the least competitive was me, and the only person I was competing with was myself, and once we got over that, we had a great time.

3. The following year I had a book published, Behind the Redwood Door. Having a book published was not new to me, so that wasn’t the rite of passage. The rite of passage I experienced in 2011 was a relatively new one in our culture: I joined Facebook. I learned and practiced the art of blatant self-promotion and social networking via the Internet.

This passage was not an easy one for me. I’d been raised to be modest, no matter how brilliant I thought I was. My public motto has always been “Aw, shucks.” But I felt I owed some BSP to my indie publisher, Oak Tree Press, so I bit the bullet. I joined Facebook. I also did an email blitz; I created and maintained a blog, visited the blogs of my colleagues, and participated in an exhausting blog tour. Signings. Conferences. Panel discussions. But the big one was joining Facebook, something I’d sworn never to do.

The big promo for Behind the Redwood Door is over, but I still check out Facebook once a day.

So there they are, three rites of passage: a summer romance, a 50^th reunion, and joining Facebook. The reason I clump these three rites of passage together is because they all drive the plot the novel I’m currently writing.

In the novel, Kit Sawyer, a has-been popular folksinger in his late sixties, is trying to make a comeback. His domestic partner (Kit’s bisexual, and in a committed relationship with another man) is running this campaign, and he persuades Kit to get on Facebook. Kit does so, reluctantly, and then discovers there’s an audience for his new recordings among his classmates from boarding school. He’s lured into returning to the school for the 50^th reunion, mostly because of what else he learns through Facebook. What is that? It involves an affair he had—his first affair—with a sassy and pretty housekeeper at a Colorado dude ranch, back in 1962, when Kit was twenty years old.

How do these rites all intersect in the plot of my novel? I won’t tell you any more, partly because I don’t want to give away any surprises, but more because I’m only halfway through my first draft, and my characters have the irritating but charming habit of making their own decisions, so I’m sure to be surprised myself.

One thing I’ll make clear now: I’m not a bit like Kit Sawyer, and the events in my novel are entirely fictitious. But I do confess that had I not had a summer romance in South Texas in 1959, if I had not attended my 50^th school reunion, and if I had not joined Facebook in the fall of 2011, I wouldn’t be writing this novel.

FANCY MEETING YOU HERE!

For this month’s invitational blog post, I invited writers to imagine going to a familiar place and being surprised to meet someone they hadn’t seen in a long, long time. The stories I received are posted below.

For next month, here’s the assignment and the challenge: write a Halloween story. Anybody reading this is welcome to submit a story. Send it to me as an email. My email address is jmd@danielpublishing.com. The deadline is October 1, 2012.

As usual, your story must be 99 words long, and it must be a real story. What does that mean? In a real story, something has to happen to somebody. Somebody needs to change. And remember: a story needs conflict.

So when you write your Halloween story, make it scary. Don’t just write about having fun dressing up and eating candy. Surprise us. frighten us! Use your wild imagination and have fun! Believe in magic, and don’t be afraid of the dark.

Now, as promised, here are the stories submitted for this month, on the theme of chance encounters…

FANCY MEETING YOU HERE

COUNTRY SUMMER

by Marie Rose Elias

Fondest memories of childhood are  times at my grandparents’ house “in the country.” 

Grandpa came to Brooklyn before dawn to drive the lot of us out there. The trip was long, and he never drove over thirty miles an hour. Cookouts, the beach, and our cousins awaited.… We endured  watching the sunrise over the woods on Route 27. 

One early morning cars parked were up to the lawn, down the road, and around corners on both sides. Tumbling from the Comet we saw every one of our cousins, aunts, uncles! 

All thirty-seven first cousins together!

HAPPY 50th ANNIVERSARY!  

Let’s party!

 •••

ALGONQUIN PARK

By Denise Dreany

The leaves had turned red in Algonquin Park.  The sky was as blue as I remembered and I could smell the sharp pine.

Along the shore of the lake I saw my father skipping stones.

“Dad,” I asked.  “Why did you leave us?” 

We talked for a long time.

“Who was that with you on the streets of that stark Ontario town?”

The stars came out and time flickered like the northern lights of my childhood.  We sat by a fire and roasted potatoes as we used to.

“Dad,” I asked, “were you happy?”

•••

A VERY SPECIAL DAY

by June Kosier

I was at the church I attended as a little girl. As I was saying a prayer, my father arrived.

“Dad, what are you doing here?  You never went to church except when I received one of the sacraments.”

“Those were very special times and I wanted this day to be one also.”

We talked and then he said goodbye and left.

I woke up to remember that the church is gone, sold by the diocese and torn down to build a grocery supercenter. And Dad had been dead for twenty years.  

Yet, it was a very special day.

•••

RENEWED ACQUAINTENCES

By Jerry Giammatteo

 “I haven’t eaten here since school,” I told my wife, entering the Gray Wolf, near St. John’s University. Actually, I drank more than ate following basketball games and exams.

She walked in with her husband. It had been years. We had been close; not romantically, but she was funny and we made one another laugh. Until we had a falling out. 

 “They let anybody in nowadays,” she said and we laughed.

An after-dinner drink; more laughs. We exchanged email addresses. She turned serious. “What happened,” she asked?

“I don’t remember,” I said.

Staying angry is a waste, isn’t it?

BIG ROCK CANDY—NO CUSTARD PIE

I’m in the midst of reading The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner’s big, sprawling, beautiful novel, which was published in 1943, when Stegner was thirty-four years old. I’ve been reading this book for a couple of weeks now, and I’ll still be reading it a couple of weeks hence. That’s partly because I have so little time for reading, but more because I’m a terribly (or wonderfully) slow reader. Furthermore, the better the book the slower I read it. I savor each word, to hear it as I read. And when I read an especially beautiful passage, such as one of Stegner’s many descriptions of the American Western scenery in all the seasons, I enjoy the luxury of slowing down and rereading whole sentences, whole paragraphs, whole scenes.

I won’t write a review of The Big Rock Candy Mountain here, because the book has already been reviewed by the best of critics and countless scholars; anything I could write would read, in comparison, like a high school book report. But I will say that The Big Rock Candy Mountain shows handsomely the hardy, lawless frontier spirit that survived into the twentieth century, after the West had supposedly been tamed. It is a book of vast opportunity, incurable dreams, and reckless adventure, worthy of the West itself.

I was a student of Wallace Stegner’s in 1968. At that time I was twenty-seven years old, and he was an elder statesman at fifty-nine. Those statistics fascinate me now, because I’m now seventy years old and still trying to learn to write. What’s more, I’m presently learning to write by reading a book that Wallace Stegner must have been writing in his late twenties and early thirties, when he was less than half the age I am now.

 One thing I learned from Stegner back in 1968 is that writing should have consequence. It should be important. That seems now to go without saying, but back then on college campuses, the favorite fiction writers, the ones that many students admired and imitated, were clever, entertaining, but in the long run inconsequential writers like Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme, and Terry Southern. When shallow student work of that stripe showed up in our seminar, Mr. Stegner kindly, politely pointed out that cleverness was not enough. As he pointed out, “You can’t nail a custard pie to the wall.”

Well, if I’ve caught your interest, and if you agree that a novel needs to be important to be great, then read (or reread) The Big Rock Candy Mountain. It’s no custard pie.

p.s. This is my second blog post honoring Wallace Stegner. An earlier tribute appeared February 16, 2011. For more thoughts about this fine teacher and great writer, see: http://johnmdaniel.blogspot.com/2011/02/remembering-wally.html

FATE IS A FACT OF FICTION

“Fate” is a one-word tautology. Doris Day, that smooth-talker, told us all about it: “Whatever will be, will be.” Fate is the inescapable future, depending on the undeniable present, which is built of the unchangeable past. We can’t change our fate; we can only discover it. We may affect our future, perhaps, by quitting smoking or by driving drunk, by studying hard for the LSAT or by quitting IBM in a huff, but when we do that we’re only acting as an agent for fate.

Whether we bring about our fate by exercising free will, or whether it’s all written in stone, or on the wind, doesn’t really matter. It’s gonna happen. I don’t know if the stars and planets have anything to do with fate, but I’m guessing probably not. Is fate just a sequence of silly accidents that pop and fizzle throughout time and space? I don’t think so. I also don’t believe there’s a Big Dude in the sky charting it all out with a quill pen and papyrus, or may stone tablets, or maybe a golden abacus with pearl buttons, or maybe a giant Excel spreadsheet, spread out all over the firmament. Is fate merely the inevitable result of how a bunch of vulnerable dominos were set up sometime during the Big Bang, so that how we fare and how we die are just the consequences of the laws of chemistry and physics, constant and fair throughout the universe? Who knows? Who, for that matter, has time to care?

Fate is a fact of life, the way of the world, and the human condition. But these definitions are too limiting, because the inevitable and interconnected march we’re all on, plodding or racing into the future, also affects other living beings; other gasses, liquids, and solids that may not contain what we self-importantly call life; and other places in the vast universe, hot spots and cold spots where change may be wildly different phenomena. Fate happens out there, too.

Was fate established by an intelligent designer? Nope. Fate just is, always was, and, chances are, always will be. Whether or not it is propelled by intelligent design is a giant can of wriggling worms that I don’t care to open.

Fate is a matter of fact.

Moving on, fate is also an essential ingredient of the man-made microcosm of existence that we call fiction. We writers have every right to call ourselves the creators of our model-size universes. And we plot our stories using intelligent design. Or if we’re not plotters, we at least hold the reins intelligently. And we get to rewrite and revise, which is something even the mythical Big Dude can’t do.

However we think of fate when we talk about the real world, we can get better handle on it when we make up our stories, based on how we understand the laws of fairness and irony that define the stories in human culture.

The concept of fate is essential to storytelling and fiction writing. And one thing to know, one rule to follow or disobey at your own peril is: Dire predictions come true.

This is true in drama: Chekhov told us that when a rifle is hanging over the fireplace in Act One, that rifle must go off before the final curtain comes down. And when rifles are discharged on stage, someone’s going to get hurt.

The rule works in movies, too. If a character you love starts to cough from some illness, you’d better get out the Kleenex, because chances are that character won’t live long enough to read the credits.

Fate was essential to Greek tragedy. When an oracle tells King Laius that his infant son will one day kill him, he and his wife cripple the child and leave him to die on a mountaintop. Does the infanticide work? No way. The kid grows up, comes back to town, unwittingly kills his dad, and I won’t say what he does to his mom.

In the fairy tale, when the spiteful fairy godmother predicts that the infant princess Briar Rose will, on her sixteenth birthday, prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall asleep for a hundred years, there’s no point in the King’s ordering that all the spinning wheels in town be burned. He’s be better off shopping for a good mattress.

And when the soothsayer advises Julius Caesar to beware the ides of March, he’s not really telling Caesar to call in sick on the fifteenth. What he’s saying is, “Dude. Better get your affairs in order, because come the sixteenth, you’ll no longer be wearing sandals.”

So, in fiction as in fact, it’s pointless to try to outsmart fate. The house always wins. To buck fate is to engage in hubris, and the penalty for hubris is always a most unwelcome irony. The so-called Higher Power named Fate shrugs and thunders, “Told ya so.” Of course in real life we can’t help fighting to survive (as we usually should); and because our fiction is about the human condition, our characters are likely to try to beat the odds, even if all they can hope for is a temporary respite.

There is a big difference, however, between human fate in fiction and human fate fate in fact. The fate of a character in a story ends with the words “The End.” An extension is allowed in the event of a sequel, and of course as long as the story remains in print or remains on shelves or on the Internet, the character’s fate is still accessible and knowable, but that fate is a done deal. The character may rest in peace.

In what we like to call “real life,” a person’s fate does not end with the words “rest in peace.” Death is part of the fate of each of us, but it rarely means the story is over. Because most of us, for better or for worse, are entitled to, or saddled with, an afterlife. No, the afterlife of which I speak has nothing to do with pearly gates and golden slippers, or with brimstone and pitchforks. The afterlife that is part of our lingering fate is made up largely of memories stored by friends and family; of tales told about us if we’re in any sense famous; and of DNA passed along for generations to come, for as long as human beings populate the planet, which may sound like quite a spell but is only a blip in the time span that is eternity. The point is: our lives may end but our presence remains and dwindles for a long time before it fizzles and whimpers into oblivion.

I think what makes us writers write and wish to be read is to keep our fates in progress for a while after we die. And why do we write as beautifully as we can while we are still in partnership with our fates? That’s probably the moral to this discussion: we all, willy-nilly, leave tracks in the sand. We don’t want to be remembered for ugly, obnoxious, lazy, antisocial tracks that stink of plastic litter, broken glass, and shit. No. Let us be remembered for having given the world something of value. If we have any influence over our fate, let it be this.

Note: This essay first appeared in the literary magazine Black Lamb.

Ugly Ducklings and Princesses on Parade

For this month’s blog post, I invited writers to send me 99-word stories inspired by fairy tales, either “Cinderella” or “The Ugly Duckling.” I also asked that the stories be to some extent autobiographical, based on some change in the writer’s own life.

Some delightful stories came in, and they’re posted below. Read and enjoy!

Your next assignment:

Imagine a special place you like to go, a place that has much meaning for you. Write a story about going to that place, and being surprised to find someone there whom you haven’t seen in a long, long time.

Use your imagination, and remember that in a story something has to happen. How will this meeting change you, or the other person, or both of you? And don’t forget: good stories thrived on conflict!

Deadline: September 1, 2012

NOW FOR THIS MONTH’S STORIES…

•••

NO MORE FROGS    

by Marie Rose Elias 

Being an old fashioned romantic, I thought marriage was forever…wed at 22 and soaring with hope. Leaving with 2 kids in elementary school was reality.

At 35 I married again. He became aloof soon after, barely noticing much when the kids were grown and gone.

I woke him from his nap and asked him to move out, planning never to marry again. Freedom was blissful. I happily danced every weekend, responsible for no one but myself. I was like a butterfly.

At 48 my perfect dashing prince was sent. We danced far past midnight at our enchanted magical wedding

•••

THE UGLY DUCKLING

by Denise Dreany

The swans were powerful men, thick breastbones, broad wings. I was with the ducks, mawkish, complaining.

“No point in sticking your neck out,” they said.  But secretly I thought, “Isn’t that what necks are for, if you were born with one that was long and slender?”

“No point flapping your wings.”  But what if your wings were aching to spread? What if the agony of not soaring was greater than the comfort of belonging?

My eyes opened and I saw their necks were short, their courage small.  I looked at myself and saw a black mask and silver wings.  

•••

OPEN LETTER TO CINDERELLA

by Rita Kushner

Dear Cindy,

We were fifteen and sixteen when Prince tried the glass slipper on my adorable tiny size 4½ foot.  Through the sixty-five years of our marriage he has uncomplainingly paid for my countless purchases of red ballet slippers, rubber galoshes, leather walking shoes, and fashionable high-heeled alligator boots.

My prince lives with my shoe fetish of miniature shoes on the cocktail table, display cases of collectible slippers on the bedroom wall, calendars of shoes.

Now, child, you must determine whether your prince will happily love you ever after when your foot no longer fits into that glass slipper.

•••

THE UGLY DUCKLING AND HER SWAN

by Rita Kushner

Only ugly duckling book-worms wore eye-glasses when I was eight…chubby me…shapeless unruly hair.  Ugh.  The books in the library, butterflies in cases in the museum compensated.

Then came along handsome, bespectacled Swan.  We mated and begat a flock; two wore contact lenses.  My senior skin was besmirched with smile wrinkles and well-deserved worry lines. Bad hair turned white and matched Swan’s feathery white beard.

         Swan took me under his wing and we flew over the world.  Now with writing pad, and his block of wood and carving knives, we hope to continue to glide healthfully every after.

•••

CINDERELLA (ELLA FOR SHORT)

by Elaine Polson Shiber

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Ella.  She lived with her parents and her big sister Stella. Stella was mean to Ella, teasing her and making her cry.

When Ella started school, though, she laughed because her teachers liked her, her friends liked her, and she was smart. 

Much later she married a handsome man and they had two beautiful daughters. Then three perfect grandchildren arrived.  One sad day, Ella’s husband died, so to banish her tears she married another handsome man.

Ella and Stella became friends at last and they all lived happily ever after.

•••

A DISH SERVED COLD

by Jerry Giammatteo

All agreed he was ugly. Kids teased him. Girls ignored him. He never got invited to parties. Saturday nights were spent home.

He disappeared after school. Nobody thought about him. Life went on, taxes paid, babies born. Nobody knew what happened to him. Nobody cared.

There was a twenty year reunion; King, Queen, Valedictorian, and the “in” crowd present.

A gasp ensued. An elegant looking gentleman walked in. On his arm was the most gorgeous woman in the room. Everybody stared in shocked recognition. They were the perfect couple.

A hint of a condescending smirk appeared on his face.

•••

I CLEAN UP NICELY

by June Kosier

I used to be a dialysis nurse and had to be at work early in the morning.

 I would throw on old jeans and a tea shirt and put my hair in a ponytail.  At work, I would change into blue scrubs provided by the hospital.  We all looked like Smurfs.

Then came the night of the Kidney Foundation Ball and  I had a chance to change from an ugly duckling or at least a “plain Jane”  into Cinderella. 

When my date said “Wow!” I said to him, “Yes, I clean up nicely, don’t I?”

•••

UGLY DUCKLING

by James A. Ryngala

He was always considered overweight, or "husky," as they used to say.  He had tried almost every diet  that was out there with no avail. It also did not help his self-esteem that he was near-sighted and had  to wear glasses. 

Finally school was over and he could start anew in college.  Unfortunately, nothing changed.  

After graduation, he got a good paying job with benefits.  He joined a gym and got Lasik surgery. He lost all the weight, toned up his body and got rid of the glasses.  At his fifth re-union, he wasn't ugly duckling anymore.