Andy Kravis author page

We're pleased to see how many of our original clues made the final cut. Our compliments to the editors for their fun STATES clue!

Inspired by Margit Christenson, last Wednesday's constructor, Erik and I will be donating our payment for this puzzle. Erik is donating to Deja's transition fund. I will be donating to the families of Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, and Jacob Blake.

ANDY: As always, I'm so grateful that I get to make puzzles with Erik. (very mutual! -ea) If you're not already solving the puzzles he edits over at USA Today, go do that. You won't be sorry.

I'm so proud to once again be involved in a project called Queer Qrosswords, which is a collection of top-notch crosswords made by folks in the LGBTQ+ community. To purchase the puzzles in the newest Queer Qrosswords anthology (subtitled 2 Queer 2 Qurious), all you have to do is donate $10 or more to a LGBTQ+ charity and email Queer Qrosswords the receipt, and they'll email you a copy of the puzzles.

Now on to this puzzle, which was inspired by Andrew Ries in many ways. For one, around this time last year, Andrew held a contest to have a guest themeless puzzle published as part of his weekly crossword subscription; this puzzle was my entry into that contest, and Andrew gave me a lot of great feedback.

For another, I was initially inspired to tackle this grid design after solving Andrew's STAGGER SESSIONS, a self-published collection of themeless crosswords that all had this similar pattern of stagger-stacked central entries (that is, long entries offset from each other usually by one square, so that they loosely resemble stairs). What I love about this particular grid design is that it allows you to start with three fresh marquee entries, and then you still have a ton of flexibility when building outward from the center of the grid. I started this one with WHO ASKED YOU, and I liked the way the WH- of WHISKEY RING looked underneath it. From there, it was off to the races.

I'm very happy with how this puzzle turned out. Some of my original clues were way too out there, but I'm glad a few of the weirder ones stuck around, like the clues for ROLEPLAY and EWE. And major props to Will for the great EROTIC ART clue!

I like crosswords that tell a story or describe a punny scene. Merl Reagle was the master of this kind of puzzle (as he was of so many things); I also really enjoyed Ross Trudeau's recent puzzle in this style that told the story of two people's quest, fraught with disagreement and indecision, to choose a board game to play. Today's puzzle doesn't reinvent the genre, but I hope it tickles the folks who enjoy such themes.

I was surprised that EID hadn't appeared in the Shortz era (and in previous appearances, it had never been clued as [Islamic festival] or similar), so I was pleased to be able to include it in this grid. I'm also glad I could debut the entry CISWOMEN. My original clue was [Ones whose gender identity corresponds to having been assigned female at birth]; the use of "females" as a noun has always skeeved me out a little, but I appreciate that the essence of the clue was unchanged. Thanks to the editors for accepting and running a puzzle with those entries.

ERIK: Easy puzzles are so hard to write! Many of our tougher themes have seemed to develop almost instantaneously, but when we sat down and decided to try for an early-week publication, it took us several hours of rejected ideas and general head-scratching to come up with this one theme. Getting a sufficiently clean fill was not without its challenges, either; Andy's grid wizardry saved our bacon a couple of times when I was sure the task would be impossible to complete.

ANDY: I was surprised this wasn't slated for a Monday, though I expect many solvers will welcome a breezy Tuesday.

One challenge we had with filling this grid is that although all the theme answers are 11 letters long (and thus theoretically interchangeable in the grid), we agreed that the articles of clothing should be ordered in the grid from top to bottom as a person would wear them. The loveliest touches in the fill — RUBY DEE, CRAZY HORSE, SHREK, RUMBA, etc. etc. — are Erik's handiwork.

I do miss our original clue for THREE-WAY TIE, [Article of neckwear for Cerberus?]. It brought me no small amount of joy to imagine a three-headed hellhound wearing a little tie on each of its necks, though I admit that the Three Stooges are more suitable for an early-week puzzle.

NATAN: This puzzle was such a treat to make, even by the standards of the already lovely JASA process. The people, for one: we're joined by new faces, like Andy Kravis up at the lectern, who's so encyclopedic we barely need to research for clues anymore, and new constructors like Susan, Tom, Joe, and more, who're injecting even more humor and breadth into these collaborations.

For another thing, this was one of those puzzles where students became teachers — the JASA class came up with the revealer, brainstormed the best theme pairs, drew up the skeleton of the grid, and even bailed us out of a bad fill moment by dropping in OH MY LORD where we'd had OH MY WORD and were coming up empty or trivial.

We were also able to keep a wide-open construction with some nice long entries. Hope y'all like it!

ANDY: This was my first puzzle with the JASA class, and I'm looking forward to making many more with them.

We enjoyed creating the puzzle and coming up with possible pairs (WATER FOR ELEPHANTS / LARGE-EARED = "Like the water in Africa" and PAN FOR GOLD / LEPRECHAUN = "He keeps his pan in a pot" didn't quite make the cut). We were really happy with how the fill came out, and we hope that people were satisfied with the difficulty level and the amount of connection provided between the substitutes and the substituted clues.

VICTOR: I think that I am at my best as a constructor when I am coming up with new ways to play with how a puzzle works. I tend to write Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday puzzles as a result, and I think that this was among my better efforts. I also seem to like ideas that are difficult to turn into a viable puzzle, which makes working with Andy, who is an amazing grid constructor/filler, really nice. I like collaborating in general because everyone has different skills, and something good almost always emerges. Now, if I could just learn to nae nae …

ANDY: Victor always has clever and ambitious theme ideas. It's a fun challenge to try to make clean, interesting grids out of them without compromising on theme content. This one needed a lot of tweaking, but eventually, everything just fell into place. I'm really happy with all the fresh non-theme fill we were able to include (ACE OF HEARTS, WALK ON WATER, CARE BEARS, GAYBORHOODS, BOYS' LIFE, PIANO TRIO, TOTE BOARD, SEAN YOUNG, PET GOAT, etc.) with very little crosswordese or junk fill.

I wrote this puzzle the day after I saw MOONLIGHT, which instantly became one of my favorite movies. I submitted the puzzle to Will shortly after the film won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture — Drama (and Mahershala ALI was nominated for Best Supporting Actor); I guessed that if and when the puzzle were published, both MOONLIGHT and ALI would get Oscar-related clues.

I'm glad some of my favorite clues made it into the puzzle, including [Where to stick a needle] for SEWINGKIT, [Business meeting?] for NETWORKING, and [Dimensions without planes] for NOFLYZONES. Some of my other favorites were deep-sixed, unfortunately: [Maria Bamford, for one] for COMIC, and [One of four in Mississippi] for TITTLE. I liked the new clues for ENFORCING [Putting teeth into] and for BOT [What may have a strong net effect?].

My original clue for TONGUE was [It may be silver or sharp], which I wasn't particularly attached to. I was surprised to see that the new clue for TONGUE included "Mandingo," especially given the negative associations with the word, and that "Mandinka" seems to be the preferred name for the language and still does the punny work of starting with the same letters as "Mandarin."

VICTOR:

I think that the best puzzles I construct, and I think that "Rise and Fall" is one of them, are those in which the idea has a moment when it seems impossible to execute in a publishable puzzle. Triple-checked letters pose a particular challenge because they constrain the fill but do not reduce the number of words in the puzzle, so meeting the NYT's guidelines gets difficult quickly. In the case of "Rise and Fall," fitting the black squares around the mountains and valleys was tough, and then the sharp corners were messy, but it looked fillable when I started out with it (in mid-2014!). Of course, months of false starts later, I was still unsuccessful, so I asked Andy to co-construct it with me.

I like Andy a lot, he's a terrific filler and collaborator, and he seems to think a bit differently from me, which makes us able to find solutions together that we (at least I) might not find alone. The first thing he did was suggest adding MOUNTAINHIGHVALLEYLOW across the middle, which was a great addition to the puzzle — and which is a rather strange song (and not the one by Tina Turner that I suspect most people think of when they see it).

We went back and forth on a few iterations and finally managed to get something we liked with 144 words. Close enough, right? Wrong. Will sent it back for being too wordy, so we hacked at it for another couple of months and got it down to a 140-worder. I hope that people liked the puzzle. (P.S. I started with KILIMANJARO instead of SAINTHELENS, but that proved impossible. Such is life!)

ANDY:

I don't much to add, except that I always enjoy working with Victor. His theme ideas are always unique, which makes the process of constructing the puzzle much more fun.

This was one of the first puzzles I ever constructed, almost three years ago. I'm surprisingly happy with it, though there are some places where my greenness as a constructor shows.

Firstly, the theme. It's a simple replace-a-letter theme, which I didn't know at the time was a theme type that has been used quite a lot. Specifically, my idea for this puzzle was to take movie titles and replace a letter with X, to humorous effect. I'm actually very pleased with the four theme entries in this puzzle (MARX ATTACKS, A BEAUTIFUL MINX, THE LOVELY BOXES [with Will's idea of a crossword-themed clue], and EAT X-RAY LOVE), since it was very difficult for me to even come up with four symmetrical entries of this type that weren't complete gibberish (for example, FOX A FEW DOLLARS MORE) or uninteresting (SIN CITY could become SIX CITY, but who cares?).

It's a bit inelegant, however, that there's no pattern for which letters get replaced with Xs. I tried to solve that problem by sneaking the revealer X-RATED into the southeast corner of the grid, but the fill turned irreparably sour very fast. In another venue, I might have titled this puzzle "X-Rated Remakes" or "Censored Movies" to make the theme more coherent. Overall, I think the result is funny enough to justify the lack of revealer, and I'm glad Will agreed.

Secondly, the fill. By and large, I think it's pretty clean, but there are some entries that would make me scowl as a solver (I'm looking at you, STAEL, NIM, and RECT). I'm letting myself off the hook for these transgressions since I don't see any obvious ways to improve the fill, and the crossings are all fair.

Finally, I'm pleased at how many of the clues in the final puzzle are mine. I'm especially proud of the clues for DALI [Collaborator with Disney on the film "Destino"] and BETTE DAVIS [Actress with the iconic line "What a dump!"]. There are couple of my clues I wish Will had kept — specifically, I liked my clues for UNFEMININE [Like burping loudly or sitting with one's legs splayed, stereotypically], OLDEST [Like Kevin, among the Jonas Brothers] and the clues for the adjacent TOFU and HAM, which were, respectively, [Vegetarian's source of protein] and [Carnivore's source of protein].