People sometimes ask, "Where do you get your story ideas?" Well, for A Suspicious Christmas, it's easy. I once had a landlord who would say he was going to stop by and fix something at a specific time, and then he wouldn't show up. I'd call and he wouldn't answer, and I was not above leaving angry messages to the effect of "Where the &!# are you?" It was like he dropped off the face of the earth!

A week later, he'd show up out of the blue to fix whatever needed fixing without a care in the world. He was so happy-go-lucky; it was impossible to stay mad at him.

Though I moved away a couple years later, that central idea always stuck with me. What if a landlord went missing and his tenants became suspects in his disappearance? And what if two of them played amateur detectives and tried to find him? It gave me a chance to explore the under-publicized dynamics of apartment living, as well as make the plotline a vehicle for the two protagonists to discover not just the landlord's whereabouts, but surprising, even shocking things about themselves, their neighbors and the community they live in.

Why set it at Christmas? I'm not sure, but I think it's because I've always liked Christmas movies and thought it was high time to set one in my hometown of Pittsburgh.