A while ago, I was listening to a podcast about Lord of the Rings that mentioned an idea Tolkien coined called eucatastrophe, an enormously good thing happening out of nowhere. It's meant to refer to things like the happy endings at the end of fairy tales, but to me the word suggests something different--a good thing that is somehow catastrophic, such as something fantastic happening to someone you hate, or someone else getting good news that you wanted for yourself. Falling victim to this kind of catastrophe is par for the course in my industry. Over the years, I've become fairly comfortable coping with the various side effects of envy--in short, use it as a tool to put you in touch with what you really want, and recognize that no amount of stewing will make you any more successful or the other person any less so--but it wasn't too difficult to dip into those feelings to write this scene.