Regarding my story "My Wife is a Bear in the Morning":
A friend challenged me to write a story about a bear. I was surprised to realize that I have written about 80 stories, but not one of those stories has had a bear in it. I like bears, so I'm not sure how that happened. I wracked my brain for weeks trying to think of an idea I loved enough to write, but the only phrase that kept popping into my head was the expression "_____ is a bear in the morning" meaning someone who is grumpy and hard to deal with after they wake, often until they get some coffee or some other thing to get their day going. But that's not a speculative story and that's not really about a bear. Frustrated at lack of progress on brainstorming, I realized that if I simply took the phrase literally, that it does become a speculative story and it does become a story about a bear. After that, the full outline of the story was in my head in a matter of minutes and I typed it pretty much fully formed (except I made the couple Chinese-Americans in one last edit so that could slip in the bit about the panda bear).
This one was a lot of fun to write, and was one of those rare cases where the writing just flows easily without much need to revise.
The name of the downstairs neighbor, Mr. Ellsworth, just happened to be the first surname my mind grasped at when I was looking for a name. I wasn't intentionally tuckerizing Spencer Ellsworth, but he does happen to be the only person I personally know with that surname (though I have family living near Ellsworth Air Force Base as well). I find it very amusing that this particular story shared a flash episode with a story by Spencer Ellsworth himself.