David Liben-Nowell author page

I knew from the beginning that this theme would break the no-repeated-entry rule, but this construction unlocked itself when I decided that it was also okay to abandon the 15x15 grid and let the puzzle be the shape that it just naturally wanted to be. In fact, I'd spent a long time trying to make this or some other sandwich puzzle instead, in a 15x. The Reuben was particularly seductive, with its 15-letter SLICE OF RYE BREAD and the fact that its other ingredients are symmetric-length, too, but its ingredients never looked quite right when they went into a grid, and, eventually, this very classic sandwich (and the very non-classic 12x19 grid) was the winner.

It's probably surprising how much you (well, I) end up doubting things that you're pretty sure you know but can't quite figure out how to fact-check: that you don't have to use grape jelly to make a good PB&J; that the peanut butter definitely goes below the jelly/jam, not above; etc. But, happily, in the end, this puzzle ended up being the exact version of the sandwich that I remember from childhood. And I'd rather have one of these than a Reuben, anyway.

I'm thrilled to have finally cracked a Monday — I've always struggled to come up with themes that are both interesting and approachable. Finally, I have something to counterbalance my hefty pile of Monday-level rejections!

VICTOR: I thought that I'd give a little history on the puzzle since especially new constructors might be interested in the timeline. The first communication I can find between David and me on this was from June 22, 2017, and it involved the idea of putting a word (such as BASE) in the puzzle twice, with a clue elsewhere like "Player positioned to the left of X-Across," with the answer SHORTSTOP, since the shortstop plays to the left of second base." Then there was some back and forth about possible "second ___" combinations. It took us over a year to get to something we liked, and it went to Will in late August 2018.

In December, we got a tentative acceptance from Will but with a request to remove the cross-reference clues and just clue the second word as (SECOND) ___. So, the second BASE became "It's halfway around the diamond." Of course, that meant writing a new puzzle, but after we'd come as far as we had, rewriting the puzzle was small potatoes. We got a new version done in about two weeks and shipped it off. Will sent back a few quibbles, and then we put together the final version in early January 2019.

It's still not flawless (I wrote in one e-mail that "no one is going to have a party about BEIGES"), but it came out reasonably well. All told, almost 16 months of constructing, three to four months in review, and five months in the queue make right around two years from conception to publication. I hope that people enjoyed solving the puzzle as much as we enjoyed making it.

DAVID: I feel like the experience of filling a puzzle is all about tradeoffs — some version of "is using entry X worth the cost of having to use entry Y?" asked over and over. One of the things that I appreciate about collaboration with Victor (in addition to his persistent generosity and good humor) is that, first, we both try to maintain high standards in the fill, and that, second, the hypothetical entries that I hate are quite different from the ones that he hates.

I know of myself that I tend to overweight the benefit of a long entry that I find lively and fun, even if it means several of the kind of short entries that Victor calls "crud" (the less good three-letter acronyms, partial phrases, ...). Meanwhile, Victor happens to be a serious Latinist who knows a great deal more about pop culture than I do (not a high bar!), so he's happy to use proper names and Latin words that are both like foreign languages to me.

Neither of us wants to end up with something that we hate, so a lot of our back and forth is about each of us trying to excise some personally hated entry from a corner. The grid did not (and never does) end up being perfect, but at least this version includes none of RERISEN, IRING ("Do you want me to knock, or should ___ the bell?"; IRE was also in that version of the puzzle), and MANOLO, all of which were seriously considered at some stage in this construction process. (And all of which might still be worth it sometimes, but not this time.) I'll echo Victor's wishes: this puzzle was great fun to put together over its long journey, and I hope that it was a fun puzzle to solve!

This puzzle is one of the success stories of the editing process, so I owe extra thanks to Will for this one, for having both high standards and patience with constructors.

Back in 2015, I'd built a puzzle around the same pair of 15-letter seeds (which may speak a little to their pairing: I was starting to write this puzzle just as Obergefell v. Hodges was being decided — plus I'm a computer science faculty member, so I was particularly drawn to the second of the two long entries). I had managed to include a bunch of other longer entries that I liked a lot (SPARKPLUG, HARPER LEE, ITS SO EASY, ...), but, as the rejection note from Will and Joel said, there were too many ugly short entries that "start to add up after a while to make for unpleasant solving." That's always a tendency that I have to fight when I'm filling puzzles: I tend to overvalue what I consider to be awesome long entries and fail to pay enough attention to the costly short junk that they induce.

I got similar feedback from some other editors at other venues, and so, begrudgingly, I put the puzzle away in my (overstuffed) filing drawer of rejections.

But I kept finding myself compelled by this pair of 15s, and so I pulled it back out a couple of years later. In short, I moved a couple of black squares around, refilled again from scratch, reclued it all, and submitted a new version. A good portion of the NW corner (my favorite portion of the 2015 version) stayed intact from attempt #1 to attempt #2, and OVINES survived (but migrated in the grid); save those pieces and the 15s, everything else was brand new.

And here's the result. Hope you enjoy it — and, even if you don't, I hope you appreciate that the version you didn't see was a lot worse!

This puzzle's origin story is a little twisted, and it's probably mostly invisible in the published version. But here's the story anyway ...

In April 2015, I heard a talk by Daniel Levin Becker at Carleton College, where I teach. His talk was about the Oulipo (OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle, usually translated as something like "workshop for potential literature"), a group of mostly French writers who work under massively restrictive self-imposed structural constraints in their writing. Some of the most famous examples include Georges Perec's E-less novel "La Disparition" ("A Void") and his novel "Life A User's Manual" (based around a chapter-by-chapter knight's tour of an apartment building, among many other constraints).

A few tenuous mental connections later, I ended up with the constraint that I imposed on myself for this puzzle: a 15-letter central entry that was its own answer. (My original submission used this central entry as part of a logical paradox of a "this puzzle contains one error" form, but the paradox piece ended up disappearing from the published version — I think in part because the clues were just too long.) There aren't that many 9-letter numbers in roughly the right numerical range, so I was practically forced into THIRTYTWOACROSS and a grid like the one you see now — including those "cheater" squares in the corners to make the numbering work. And, as an ultimate player myself, I worked pretty hard to make FRISBEE work as 1-Across.

Incidentally, I read "Life A User's Manual" right after submitting this puzzle. It's exactly the kind of book I think I should love — and I pretty much *hated* it. I'll leave out the rant about the many reasons, but here's hoping that the puzzle it inspired doesn't trigger the same reaction in you!

We first started talking about some kind of CIRCULAR REASONING puzzle at the 2015 Minnesota Crossword Tournament (where we'd met a few years prior, after both constructing puzzles, and hitting it off both interpersonally and cruciverbally). We started thinking about a Sunday-sized puzzle (a large circle of marked squares containing "CIRCULAR REASONING WORKS BECAUSE ..."), but we couldn't come up with enough good additional themers to go with the circled squares, so eventually we swapped to a 15x15 concept using a "circular rectangle" instead.

We went back and forth a bunch of times on the long entry, which had to be changed to have even length so it could fit as a rectangle — CIRCULAR REASONING {WORKS CORRECTLY, IS GOOD, IS USEFUL} BECAUSE ...? — before finally settling on Tom's idea of the MAKES NO SENSE version.

But the 15x15 version that we started with was, it turned out, a real bear to grid/fill to our satisfaction. It took a long while to figure out why, but eventually David realized how ambitious we were being: the two 14s imposed major constraints on the black squares in a 15x15 grid, plus the long 38-letter wrapped entry was causing some really tough letter combinations in both directions when it turned a corner — we had a ton of theme squares, and by necessity there also wasn't good separation between the theme entries. Switching to a 16x14 grid relaxed the black-square constraints from the 14-letter themers, and we were off and running.

Our original submission was a little nastier for the solver: we'd simply clued what's now 28-Around as 28-Across (and completely omitted the numbers in the squares now numbered 24, 32, and 50, which was the only hint that something strange was going on).

We hope that everyone enjoyed solving it!