Milo Beckman author page

Happy new year! I've wanted to sneak some numbers or symbols into a themeless grid for a while, since around when "WE ARE THE 99%" was in the news. I noticed New Years 2021 was a Friday and thought this would be a fun way to start the year. Full disclosure, I wanted some extra publicity for my book Math Without Numbers, which comes out on Jan 5. (Preorder now!)

Thanks very much to Will and Joel for suggesting "01 ALUMS" for the fourth theme answer. My original submission was "01 CHEVY" ... I spent hours on the shockingly comprehensive IMCDb.org trying to find a specific enough clue. Crosswords take you to some bizarre corners of the internet.

I clued this one without referencing the XWordInfo clue database — I love a puzzle where the constructor's own voice/dialect comes through. A lot of the weirder clues were changed in the editing pipeline. I'll post a side-by-side comparison on Twitter for anyone who wants to see details & get a feel for the editorial process.

Wishing all the best to crossworld in 2021.

MILO: What a difference a few years makes! I originally submitted this puzzle for Flag Day 2012 (also a Thursday), and it was rejected on the grounds that it was too political to run in The New York Times at the time. I tried again in 2015, after Obergefell v. Hodges, figuring the conversation had shifted enough and got a thumbs-up on the theme but a thumbs-down on the fill. (Looking back at it, just one section had ULLA, OBLA, and OOLA... ouch).

DAVID: I had so much fun working with Milo! I've been a big fan of his puzzles ever since he debuted in The New York Times as another young constructor. Anyway, Milo came up with this idea and many of the theme entries; my suggestion was switching from a 15x15 to a 17x13, which looks more like a flag. We were also able to space out the stripes more evenly that way.

The fill was a nightmare, given the constraints of all the theme entries. Milo and I went back and forth many times before settling on something close to what you see—the only difference is that (RED) PANDA is now the more familiar (RED) BARON, which I think was a nice suggestion from Will/Joel. The short fill still has more trade-offs than usual, but we hope the theme makes up for them.

Happy Pride Month!

A few years ago, I wanted to make a puzzle where the solution involved leaving some squares blank. My original idea involved theme entries like "RUNNING ON [EMPTY]" and "[NOTHING] PERSONAL" where the Down answers only made sense if you left the bracketed words blank. But Will rejected a couple iterations of this, on the grounds that solvers wouldn't enjoy seeing a Down answer like "ASHG" (not knowing they were supposed to leave the G blank).

So the obvious next step was a puzzle where the Down answers worked as valid entries with OR without the letter from the intersecting theme entry, so solvers would see "BRAG" when the clue suggested BRA. I played with this a bit, but I eventually gave up on it — I couldn't "explain" the gimmick to my constructing software, and I was never much good at hand-filling.

Then, in 2013, my laptop got stolen and I didn't have a backup of my laboriously compiled crossword dictionary (may it rest in peace). I tried to start over, but I was back to square one — AARE and IS AT and INRI in every fill! I got discouraged, and stopped constructing ... until I graduated college last year, needed some supplemental income, and decided to get back in on that crossword cash.

I picked this "ghost" idea back up, since (lacking a good dictionary) I'd have to do some hand-filling anyway. I wrote a Python script to generate a list of answer pairs like HOLY LAND / HOLLAND to work with, and went from there. My submitted version didn't have the second half of the revealer clue (it was just "Riddled with ghosts") since I like the idea of a gimmick puzzle that has no indication anywhere that it's a gimmick puzzle — just clues and words. But I get that people would've had too much trouble without a revealer.

Some extra details for extreme crossword wonks: To fill this puzzle, I created a new dictionary with every possible answer pair encoded in a particular way. The pair BRA / BRAG, for instance, was included in the special dictionary as the word "BRAG1" — the numeral 1 after a letter indicates that that letter can be removed and still be an acceptable entry. Then I inputted the four theme answers as rebus squares, e.g. TOWNS as T1 O1 W1 N1 S1 (see here). This way, my filling software looked at "_ W1 _ _" and suggested words from the special dictionary: AW1OL (AWOL / AOL), GW1EN (GWEN / GEN), TW1IN (TWIN / TIN), etc. I still had to handpick entries where the longer answer stood on its own — without a clue — but this rebus trick was extremely helpful.