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If Ashley Grayson ever gets to "Tyler Perry's level," she vows never to deal with talent again. There are the colorful personalities, the insecurities, the emerging egos, and the conflicting schedules, she explains in the conference room of cable network TV One's Silver Spring office. The 24-year-old Baltimorean makes this half-joking declaration as she chats about her life as an executive producer, creator, co-writer, and star of TV One's first original web series The Cube Life. Pitched to the network as Girlfriends meets The Office during a brief meeting with an executive, the show follows a young group of black co-workers at an entertainment company who are maneuvering the thorny sides of their professional and personal lives.

Don't get it twisted. Grayson, who projects an innocent, yet quiet power behind her baby face, isn't complaining. Why should she? She is, excuse the cliché, living her dreams. Born to a 15-year-old mother who also became a drug addict, Grayson was put in foster care at 10 and adopted at 14. As long as she can remember, she's been telling stories. She smiles brightly when she talks about the first book she penned: an autobiography in a Mead notebook using crayons. "People knew I wasn't normal by then," she jokes. If paper wasn't available, she'd write poetry on her jeans. The fact that she only had two pairs was unimportant.

Not surprising that at a young age, she posed adult questions: If my mom is a drug addict, does anything else exist outside this West Baltimore block? Education--she became the first in her birth family to graduate from high school and college--became part of the answer. At Morgan State, she majored in communications with a concentration in radio. After an internship at TV One in the online department, she recognized her love for the unique marriage between television and the web. Today, she works as an online producer at a local media company.

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