New York Times, Thursday, September 10, 2015

Thanks to my husband for using the idiom "spill the beans" in a story he was relating to me and for planting a fun theme idea into my constructor's brain. There was a bumper crop of phrases that ended with a type of bean but not all of them could make the cut including MCHALES NAVY, YO SOY, and ROYAL JELLY. I submitted the puzzle in March 2014 and, after a few minor tweaks to the fill, the puzzle was accepted in August 2014.

My original puzzle made it obvious that there was a trick going on as I purposely left out the clue numbers and clues on the downward "spilled" (bean) portion of the theme entries. The other way I had considered was to number the down boxes and clue them as "---". However, I was very pleased to see that Will and Joel's editing gave the theme entries some clever misdirection by numbering and cluing both the across and down words and cluing the bean types — not as beans, but with completely different definitions.

I hope you enjoy the puzzle!

Turning puzzle, various types of beans "falling," cued by SPILLED THE BEANS. We've seen many puzzles which bend themers, so these days I think it's important to have a really good reason and/or an apt revealer to justify it. I like this one, although the puzzle doesn't quite get at how I imagine things spilling willy-nilly all over the place. It's a pretty orderly set of spills.

I like how Tracy disguised the four falling BEANS. SNAP is a perfect example of it, where by itself it gets a football-related clue, and OHS / SNAP gets one with a completely different meaning. Makes for an entertaining bout of confusion when I realized the answer has to be OHS, but that didn't at all fit [Playful response to a good dig].

Turning puzzles usually cause difficulty in filling around the bends, and Tracy does pretty well here. The upper right and lower left corners are so separated from the rest of the grid that this gives her a lot of freedom to fill them cleanly. (I'm not a huge fan of ALAR, but I think it's a fine answer.)

No surprise that the roughest region is the bottom right, where the revealer bends right into a relatively big swath of white space. Tracy gets so close to a perfectly clean fill. Sigh, ITER, such a convenient entry with common letters and alternating consonant vowel … and such an old-school piece of crosswordese.

I was a little confused during my solve as I couldn't quite figure out where the themers were, so I highlighted them below. Notice the total lack of symmetry — I would have liked at least some level of symmetry, perhaps having the across parts of the themers placed in symmetrical spots. Some will argue that this asymmetry actually makes it more interesting, because it removes the predictability and thus produces a more challenging solve, but a crossword without any sense of symmetry in the themers personally strikes me as inelegant.

Nice idea, perhaps some potential left on the table giving all the crazy interpretations that might better reflect a chaotic SPILL.