Max Carpenter author page
1 puzzle by Max Carpenter
with Constructor comments
| Y | M | Y | M | I | M | T | O | O | T | I | P | ||||
| C | O | C | O | A | C | A | R | O | B | R | I | C | A | ||
| C | O | K | E | S | B | L | A | M | E | I | D | O | L | ||
| A | R | F | T | I | M | E | S | P | I | C | A | Y | N | E | |
| A | F | R | O | L | H | A | S | A | A | P | S | O | |||
| L | A | C | R | O | S | S | E | H | A | M | |||||
| A | L | T | O | N | A | S | N | E | S | T | L | E | |||
| Y | K | O | N | G | O | L | D | P | O | T | A | T | O | E | S |
| P | A | R | D | O | N | S | E | W | A | M | O | S | |||
| P | A | L | E | N | E | R | G | Y | S | E | |||||
| O | T | H | E | R | H | A | N | D | S | E | E | M | |||
| W | H | Y | Y | O | U | L | I | T | T | L | E | S | K | A | |
| L | O | D | E | N | A | C | R | E | D | R | O | I | D | ||
| E | R | R | S | C | L | E | A | N | Y | O | U | T | H | ||
| T | A | O | H | A | R | P | S | O | P | E | D |
This puzzle was simple and fun to make. I remember having the initial thought of doing a "YU" rebus as a spin on "Why you little!," then running the idea by my friend — the great Will Nediger — who was very enthusiastic, so I quickly made it and sent it in. I had to rework the grid and edit out FUNYUNS because someone hadn't heard of them.
I'm honestly surprised this is my first daily with the Times. I've been constructing since around 2008 and submitting to the Times since 2011. It's not that I was always sending them incredible work (I didn't begin using wordlists until 2017 and my earlier style was sort of a janky Something Different–esque hybrid), but still it's been a long long time coming.
Speaking of wordlists, I'm very pro the general movement of making them more accessible to beginning constructors and would love to, at some point in the future, make my wordlist publicly available for free. My main hesitation is that I've built mine up from a skeleton of a Jeff Chen list I bought years back and I can't say that the superficial research I've done on list-related copyright cases has made me confident in just brazenly posting a download link (however palimpsestic the original list's presence in mine may be after consolidating deletions, additions and rescorings). I've talked to multiple experienced constructors who similarly (i) would like to release their wordlists for free and (ii) feel somewhat barred from this by the fact that their lists are built from Chen's lists.
There's an uneasy sort of push-and-pull in the crossword world between man and machine [cue random Kraftwerk song]. There's both a tendency towards constructors optimizing puzzle quality and time spent with the help of software and databases as well as a tendency to hold onto and covet things, like private wordlists, that could be perceived to lend one's puzzles a unique stamp of human identity; with one hand we reach out to the robots, with the OTHER HAND we shield ourselves from them (and sometimes from each other). Anyway, I clearly have many thoughts on this. Feel free to drop me a line.