Brent Sverdloff author page
1 puzzle by Brent Sverdloff
with Constructor comments
See the 3 answer words debuted by Brent Sverdloff.
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BRENT: In the ten years I've been submitting to the NYT, the rejections always included constructive criticism. Comments like "the theme isn't robust enough" gave way to "we accepted a very similar puzzle weeks ago!" I felt like Thomas Edison experimenting with the light bulb. Acceptance did arrive in 2014, but this puzzle is seeing the light of day only now.
Let me back up a bit. In a used bookstore in 2006, I discovered Crossworld, Marc Romano's book about the Stamford puzzle tournament. It hooked me, as I'd been a word nerd my whole life—a linguistics major, archivist, paleographer, Spanish instructor, and memory coach. In 2006, I was living in Boston. The tourney was coming up, and I began counting the days. There, I made friends with stellar constructors and wound up giving Brendan Emmett Quigley a ride back to Beantown. His energy was infectious.
My initial efforts were pretty cringeworthy, but essential. I enjoyed some early successes, with my first puzzle appearing in 2008 in the New York Sun and in 2011 in a Penguin Anthology of literary-themed crosswords. Huge shoutouts to Peter Gordon and Ben Tausig, respectively, for their support.
The NYT remained the Holy Grail. I submitted solo and with Michael Blake, whom I'd met through Monday NYT puzzle queen Andrea Carla Michaels. We submitted this puzzle in February 2014 and got the "crossword — yes!" email from Will in April.
As I was solving an NYT puzzle in August by David Steinberg and Bernice Gordon, the answers looked eerily familiar. It was the same theme as ours! We wrote to Will, who apologized for the duplication and promised to run ours in a couple of years "so it fades from solvers' memories." He is a man of his word, and here we are today.
MICHAEL: We can hardly begrudge that Will accepted the Bernice/David collaboration with a similar theme and ran it immediately, as that carried a delightful new cruciverbal record: the biggest age difference between co-constructors. We're happy that our puzzle, accepted slightly earlier, still got published 3 years later.