Something Good: Young Author Writes Pages Of Positivity

Scarlett DeVaughn has perspective you don’t often see in a 10-year-old. 

“There’s a choice, you can choose to think about the negative and feel bad about it, or think about the positive and feel like, this is OK, I can do it again," Scarlett said.

Precocious, positive, and now published. 

Her new book "Tell Me All About This Bad Surprise" was inspired by a conversation outside Commonplace Books in Midtown. 

Her father is injury attorney Pepper DeVaughn, so it’s no surprise their conversations many times turned into debates. 

 “I argue my side, she argues her side, and most of the time she ends up right," Pepper said.

One particular debate was about surprises. 

"And he said, if there are no bad surprises, there are no good surprises, and I said no, that isn’t true," Scarlett said.

That was all the inspiration Scarlett needed, and a year and a half later, that conversation turned into a book. 

In it, she takes seemingly bad situations, and turns them into something good. 

Scarlett said the best part of the book is the impact it’s had on other people. 

“There’s this girl that said, ‘thank you so much for the book, it helped me a lot through my hard times.’ And that just filled me up with joy and made me really happy, because my main goal, I just wanted to help other people focus on the positive.” 

Scarlett said she has some ideas for other books, but ultimately, she might be a rising star in another field. 

She wants to be an astrophysicist when she grows up. 

You can find "Tell Me All About This Bad Surprise" on Amazon and at local bookstores.