Richard F. Mausser author page

I would best describe the birth of this puzzle as a collision between serendipity and luck. After stumbling on this quip by Sir Ken Dodds (b. 1927 d. 2018) through happenstance, my first reaction was a hearty chuckle. But then my constructor sense began to tingle when I noticed that "I HAVE" and "FOR IT" were each 5 characters long. Could the rest of the quip be symmetrical too? As luck would have it, yes!

After quickly building a grid around the central theme of "WHEN IT GETS BAD" I choose the scrabbly OJIBWA as my anchor fill entry, and the rest of the puzzle fell into place with what Joel would later describe as "lively fill." The whole effort was completed in a 24-hour window. Quite a change in experience from the years I spent crafting a different puzzle which was published last year.

Overall, I was pleased with the result, with the junk mildly limited to OSIS, ANS, and OSA. My assessment was confirmed several months after submission when the puzzle was accepted at face value and without my need to make any revisions (another first for me!).

Many thanks to Will and Joel for opting to go with a quip puzzle despite some views that this style is passé.

And lastly, to Sir Ken Dodds "Age doesn't matter... unless you're a cheese."

When my muse first dropped this "dirty" little idea on me several years ago, it was presented as more of a challenge than an opportunity. Almost an "I dare you to try and fit 13 theme entries into a 15 x 15 grid!"

So started a steady cycle of submissions, rejections, and complete rewrites. At one point in the process, Joel even commented that "the massive amount of theme material might make this too tough to construct cleanly." With the 50^th anniversary date looming, it finally occurred to me that using mirror symmetry might provide less constraining grid designs. My next submission came back with "almost a yes," and after a few more tweaks, my work on this one was finally over.

This puzzle was by far the most difficult and time-consuming of my limited work to date. The challenge was not so much a matter of selecting good fill, but more a function of finding "any" fill that might work. The statistician in me points out that only ten words in the final grid do not contribute at least one letter to a theme entry. Squeezing in all the theme material also required 9 of the 13 entries to intersect with each other in some fashion. So while "glue" like SLYS, RRS, OPP and OPE were less than optimal, I am content knowing I considered countless alternative options.

For those who want to keep score, other "dirty words" used in earlier failed submissions included: POLITICS, LANGUAGE, DANCING, SHAME, MIND, RICE, POOL and DOG.

Fast forward to this week: I was very pleasantly surprised to see the puzzle run on a Thursday, the actual anniversary date of the movie. I felt my accepted submission was geared to earlier in the week. But Will and Joel appropriately took the cluing up a notch, while still leaving the spirit of most of my original clues intact. If I had a choice to reclaim one clue, it would be "Carrie Underwood hit that includes Ajax as a lyric" for "Dirty" LAUNDRY.

Many thanks to Will and Joel for their steady and patient advice. I hope the gimmick doesn't reveal itself too early, and that solvers enjoy the end result.

Postscript: If pressured, I might admit that the answer to 57-down was intended to subliminally influence the opinion of certain NYT crossword reviewers. (You might notice that multiple other words could have been used instead.) With news this week of Adam West's passing, I would rather dedicate both the clue and the answer to his memory.