The Bully Antidote

Day 189

What started as a wink of an idea has grown into six months of kindness and an outline for a fiction book aimed at middle school readers.   

The Bully Antidote chronicles the story of fifth grade Caitlin and how she uses random acts of kindness to change how others treat her. 

Caitlin starts fifth grade in a funk.  Her best friend drops her for the cool kids.  The class bully targets her as her newest victim.  Her mother who quotes television stars with alarming frequency can’t understand how “they all can’t get along.” 

If things are going to get better, Caitlin needs a new plan.  That’s when she discovers that something her mom said might actually make sense.  Caitlin implements the Kindness Cure and in the process helps a bully discover sometimes the best way to make a friend is to be one. 

Or that’s the plan. 

The thing you need to know about creative types, we’re good on ideas.  It’s the follow-through that drags us down. 

My writer friends and I have spent entire weekends discussing process and managed to not scribble a word.  Locked away in a Kentucky convent, we talk schedules (and keeping to them), editing and triumphing writer’s block.  We make promises.  We set deadlines.  Then we break them all. 

The thing this project has that the others didn’t is one 9-year-old boy waiting to read it.