I tossed, or more exactly threw, the BlackBerry off my desk. I wasn’t having a fit. I was aiming for it to land in my bag on the floor, but it missed by a few feet. Being so accessible to everyone made me ultraaware that no one really needed to reach me or wanted to reach me that badly. But thank God my mother didn’t use e-mail. Feeling bad, I walked over to retrieve my BlackBerry from the floor. The moment I picked it up, the shiny bullet came to life in my hands, vibrating. For a second I thought I’d damaged the phone and that it was starting to explode in my grasp.

But when I looked down at it, I saw I had a text message—from Troy: “Capo for dinner, Sat 8. OK?”

My heart fluttered like a freshman girl’s. “OK,” I texted back.

Azita interrupted me as I hit “send.” “Time for the weekly pitch meeting. Everyone’s already in the Room.”

I grabbed my notebook and folder with news clippings I’d cut out from the paper—you never knew where the next great idea would come from—and dashed to the meeting. We were in the thick of the fall season, and we’d pretty much plotted out half the shows for the year, but that still left us with a dozen show ideas to come up with.

“Okay, anybody got anything new?” Steve said to the assembled group.

“How ’bout Internet child porn?” I offered up. “It’s edgy and controversial—it would be great for sweeps.”

Steve relaxed into his chair and jotted something in his notebook. “Go on, Dani.”

“Well, we have a successful woman, owns her own business, that kind of thing. She’s getting married to a great guy and thinks she has it made. He starts acting a bit distracted, not just the normal work-distracted stuff. So she goes digging a little, checking up on him. She looks in his computer e-mail and finds kiddie porn. She confronts him with it and he explodes, killing her.” I looked around the conference table. “Sounds great, right?”

Blank stares.

Sam, one of the staff writers, piped up, “That sounds a lot like that writer guy who was convicted of killing his wife. They found her at the bottom of the staircase, remember? I think she found his kid die porn.”

“Michael Peterson,” I cut him off. “That story is so old. It’s been done everywhere. And it wasn’t kiddie porn—she found gay porn on his computer. Who cares about gay porn?” I said this last part to the rest of the table. The guys all squirmed. “Gay porn is boring,” I added.

Sam was picking a fight now. “Okay, this guy has child porn in his e-mail account. He could just have received it from a pervert friend or something. You can’t help it if someone sends you something sick.”