Julian Lim author page

It only took 12 years, but I've finally put out a puzzle theme that honors my ethnic roots (I am an extremely un-Chinese Chinese person). My original submission was Sunday-sized, with two other theme entries, and dynasties in reverse chronological order. Will suggested that I shrink the idea down to a 15x, and this was the final product.

It is a little bit inelegant that the CHIN in CHINESE is there because of the etymology of China, which was (probably) named after its first dynasty, although I am told that scholars do disagree. More elegance points might be taken away because it really should be QIN anyway, since we use Hanyu Pinyin nowadays. Please do not spam my inbox with complaints.

With other commitments in life, I've had much less time to construct crosswords in the past few years, that is, until the pandemic restrictions in Singapore left me caged at home with nothing but time. Happily, creating puzzles is still as fun now as it was when I started 10 years ago, although keeping up with the vocabulary of young people is becoming increasingly challenging — sometimes, I feel like I need to get a couple of my undergrads to help me maintain my wordlist.

The theme of this puzzle is also admittedly a bit old-fashioned. I like the theme set I managed to come up with, though, so I hope people in the mood for an old-fashioned Sunday will have a good time. Or if not, just an old fashioned instead. Ganbei!

I actually constructed 2 versions of this puzzle before deciding which to submit, one with and the other without the central theme entry. This is the one with 5 themers — it has slightly worse fill, but I think the compromises were worth it to get BONO into the mix. A set of mononymous singers wouldn't have felt complete without him.

My big worry as I dropped this one into the mailbox was whether DURIANS were well-known enough to appear in a NYT crossword — I don't recall ever seeing one in my time in the States. I'm glad they passed muster with Will! Curious to see in comments if anyone has had the pleasure of eating one.

The other thing I noted about the final version of this puzzle is that most of my "?" clues survived the edit. I'm fond of writing them, but I think they often come out a bit too crazy for editors' tastes. It's nice that [Mixer for losers?] made the cut — the image amused me when I thought it up (or perhaps I'm just very easily amused).

I constructed this puzzle almost 3 years ago, and my main memory of it is having a titanic struggle completing the southwest and northeast corners after starting to fill the grid from the center. As a result, I think there's more ugly short stuff than I'd like in a themeless I'd construct today, particularly the yukky AN ILL. C'est la vie. I am happy that KAMA SUTRA made it into print with my original clue, which still kind of amuses me. (Or maybe I'm just easily amused.)

The eagle-eyed may have noticed that both this themeless and my last one have drug names debuted in them (CIALIS and now PAXIL) — I'm not shilling for any drug companies though, honest! On the other hand, I am generally plugging any graphic novelists/novels that find their way into my grids, so if you haven't read anything by ALAN MOORE, please do so immediately.

It might be of interest that I started constructing this puzzle almost immediately after actually visiting the 1-Across. I suspect it might be the one and only puzzleworthy entry with a JKH consonant string, which of course made its use irresistible.