Tracy Gray author page

This theme started with visually representing famous painting titles in the grid. After a few brainstorms, the concept of altering art into wacky knockoffs took over. One early version had us changing the letters F-O-R-G-E-R-Y across seven paintings into random letters to form silly phrases. For example, the "G" from FORGERY would map to the "G" a solver replaces in Leonardo's "THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI" to become "THE ADORATION OF THE MANI". This was fun, but the incorrect letters were oddly arbitrary — and having the solver mentally replace the wrong letters with F-O-R-G-E-R-Y to reveal the original titles was potentially unsatisfying.

What we decided felt most fun and impactful was including well-known original painting titles in the grid as guides, with F-O-R-G-E-R-Y squeezed into key squares alongside original letters — giving the sense that the solver is actually comparing the original to a fake, much like an art dealer. Our original Times submission included slashes in the rebus squares. The puzzle editors removed them in the final version, and we both agreed that the puzzle was better for it, since telegraphing all 7 of the either/or squares from the start would make a less tricky and satisfying solve.

Tracy and I were pleased that THE SON OF MAN snuck into our theme about forgery — since this painting appears in the 1999 film "The Thomas Crown Affair" which features a forgery scheme.

It's no secret that I like to construct puzzles with turns and movement. In the past (spoiler alert, if you haven't solved my puzzles), I've had solvers watching their steps, turning right on red, and doing the downward dog, crossword-style. So, after a few rides on an escalator last Christmas at my local mall, I decided to take my next crossword "to a whole new level" (my original submitted title).

My general idea was to find common methods of getting from one level to another. Phrases would start on one row, climb or descend, and then end on another row with a legitimate word that could be clued. This concept avoided the use of nonsense words at the end of the theme entries with a clue number and "---", but nixed fun phrases such as PARACHUTE PANTS and CANNONBALL ADDERLEY.

The crossword Gods were also unhelpful with phrases that included embedded conveyances such as ESCALATOR or ELEVATOR, so my choices of theme entries were as limited as ever for moving up and down.

My first submission included CD LADDERING, a term considered too niche by the Times' team, so I substituted PARACHUTE IN, which required an entire grid rewrite. UPS and DOWNS, indeed!

Tracy: Many thanks to Jeff for collaborating with me on my very first themeless puzzle and for helping me reach my goal of hitting for the cycle!

My vision was to have a grid with 12 multi-word phrases of 9 to 10- letter lengths, swaths of white space, and an uncluttered pattern of black squares. CRAZY BUSY came out of my mouth in a telephone conversation just prior to filling, so I used this fun 9-letter entry as my starting point.

Having no experience with filling a themeless, I took off like gangbusters in the NW and SW with no real constraints to stop me. "So far, so good," I thought, as I enthusiastically ventured into the other sections. "Don't underestimate the center," Jeff cautioned by email, as I started to encounter constraints. He suggested we start filling the larger NE section first, then the smaller SE section, and finish by merging the different sections through the center with 15- and 33-Down as our crossword linchpins. We collaborated back and forth in earnest, section after section, email after email, looking for the best phrases and fill and avoiding the gluey bits.

Jeff wrote the majority of the clues, especially the ones with wordplay, whereas I pretty much stuck to the words that had straight-out-of-Wikipedia cluing. Will and the editing team did a fabulous job, but I was happy to see that one of my favorite clues that Jeff wrote made the cut: NAPA [Where many stop and smell the rosés].

I am thrilled to have a puzzle published in the NYT during the "March for Women" week of Women's History Month. Many thanks go out to Rebecca Falcon for proposing this wonderful idea and to Will Shortz for his invitation to contribute a puzzle and for working with me and editing my puzzle.

My concept was to have the letter string O-N-E going up in random spots throughout the theme entries, and E-N-O* words (not etymologically related) going down. I tried to find phrases where ONE was embedded in a single word, but with a completely different pronunciation than ONE, such as the word ONE in TONER or CLOONEY, or spanning two words such as CLINT(ONE)RA.

I very much appreciate Will's willingness to publish my puzzle as I had requested — without circling or shading the upward O-N-E letters — so that solvers could suss out the ONE's on their own. In several of my recent puzzles with circles, some solvers commented that the circles made the aha moment too easy, and I wanted this puzzle to be appropriately Wednesday-difficult. Your thoughts?

Hope you enjoy!

The email response from the editorial team on this puzzle came as an "Almost Yes!" due to the obscurity of one of my phrases — ALCO(HOLE)NGINE. Except for the fun phrase W(HOLE)TTHEDOGSOUT, which would've required an entire grid redo, I struggled to find another phrase with the letters H-O-L-E spanning two words, so Joel agreed that a phrase containing C(HOLE)STEROL would be an acceptable replacement.

After a quick revision, my puzzle was accepted on 1/22/19 — the same day that John E. Bennett and Jeff Chen had their clever puzzle published with the EXACT SAME REVEALER — with my interpretation being different enough (thankfully!), to not be rejected for its similarity to their puzzle.

Regarding similar ideas and scooping, Sam Ezersky recently wrote to me and simply said "lotsa constructors think alike"… and I have to agree. Talking shop with other constructors at the ACPT every year, I am always amazed to hear myself and others saying over and over "I had the exact same idea as you!"

Hope you enjoy my concept!

The inspiration for this puzzle came from my title "On the Up and Up" which my crossword brain parsed into two parts: "On the Up" ("___ UP" phrases literally going upward in the grid) and "and Up" (+ the inferred UP).

Phrases with the pattern *UP were more than plentiful on XWord Info (over 2,000!), so I knew I needed to tighten (up) my concept big time. Coincidentally, my bank was advertising STEP UP CDs at the time, and that's when I saw the semordnilap STEP/PETS, and I was off to the races, looking for UP phrases that spelled a legitimate word going down in the grid. I then further constrained my theme by getting rid of phrases with articles, prepositions, and conjunctions such as LIVE UP TO THE HYPE and KEEP UP WITH THE JONESES, although I did make an exception with the colorful KISS AND MADE UP theme entry.

With only 88 theme squares, I was concerned that my theme wasn't dense enough and tried to fit in MOP UP OPERATION and PIN-UP CALENDARS at 41 and 91-across, respectively, but my aesthetic brain said no - due to the ugly build (up) of black squares in certain areas.

Hope you enjoy the solve!

SAM: I came across the phrase JUST FOR KICKS and thought it would be a great name for a shoe store. That's when the theme idea for this puzzle hit. I had wanted to collaborate with Tracy for some time, so I sent her a set of proposed theme entries and asked if she wanted to join in the fun. Happily, she agreed.

TRACY: I tackled the initial challenge of the 12-14-14-12 grid. Together, we went through several iterations of the grid, opening up 4- and 31-down for some colorful long down entries, but having to deal with some frustrating fill constraints in two areas.

SAM: I really admired Tracy's construction. As she says, a grid built around two 12s and two 14s imposes significant constraints. She made it look easy.

TRACY: With the exception of EDDA, I think we were both happy with the finished puzzle and were thrilled when we got the yes this past February.

SAM: Here's hoping the next royal baby is named Edda!

In this social media age of posting, tagging, hashtagging, tweeting, sharing, and TMI, I was inspired to create a crossword that would be interpreted as my Facebook newsfeed, with status updates and selfies chronicling my imaginary life as I traipsed across the globe. I pored over lists of tourist attractions, theme parks, World Heritage sites, landmarks, museums, sporting and concert venues, bucket list locations, etc. looking for side-by-side "ME" letters and tried to garner a varied and fun list of places where a selfie might be snapped. In fact, I googled every one of the locations I used in the puzzle and not surprisingly, there were scores of selfie images of those who had beaten me to the punch.

Some of my selfies that didn't make it to the grid included visits to TIANANMEN SQUARE, TRANSAMERICA PYRAMID, HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME, METROPOLITAN OPERA, NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL, and all but one of every MEMORIAL and MONUMENT you can think of.

Many thanks to Will, Joel, and Sam for their editing, and for coincidentally running the puzzle on the day when I will be visiting 106-across — and yes, taking a selfie!!

For most constructors, I imagine, some theme concepts never get their moment in the sun. They sit in constructors' idea books, waiting for the perfect revealer or maybe another theme entry to complete the set. The latter was the case with this puzzle; I had several phrases ending with WINGS, BRATS, and DOGS to choose from, but still needed one more fun food theme entry to throw into and onto my barbie crossword.

And then it happened … watching Super Bowl LI in a bar, scanning the menu for some appetizers, when I saw SLIDERS. Knowing sliders was also a baseball term, I contacted fellow cruciverbalist and MLB post-game highlights announcer, Mike Black, who suggested two phrases: BACKDOOR or HANGING SLIDERS. They both googled well enough, but BACKDOOR made the cut due to symmetry.

I got the yes from Will and Joel late July and am most thankful that they decided to run it so quickly and on Labor Day — the unofficial last day of summer — and a perfect day to relax, fire up the grill, and spend time with family and friends.

LOREN: A while back, Tracy and I connected on Facebook about the ACPT. When the conversation turned to the inevitable "You working on any puzzles right now?" we discovered that both of us had been kicking around the idea for an ICE rebus. I was thrilled when she suggested we combine our efforts because I don't have the construction chops to design a rebus grid on my own.

Any grid, actually. My MO is to think of a theme, decide on my theme entries, and head straight to Crossword Compiler. If Compiler doesn't offer any ready-made grids that work, I ditch the whole idea and go take a nap.

So Tracy and I came up with possible themers, and then she flat went to work. And work. And work. No telling how many grids she came up with. At one point I think "we" just decided it'd be too hard. Then a few months later boom — she emailed with this grid, and I was so impressed, I immediately got up from a nap to help with the tweaking and cluing.

I like the idea for this theme because a word "written" in a black square is unexpected and hard to see, just like that patch of BLACK ICE we've all wiped out on.

It was a pleasure to work with Tracy, a talented, inventive, resolute constructor.

TRACY: Many thanks to Loren for coming up with the concept and spot-on revealer for this puzzle! I loved the idea so much that I couldn't wait to get started on a grid (Nov. 2015)…

The problems started with the revealer BLACK ICE being 8 letters and not working in the center row of a 15x grid. It also didn't work on row 13 in the lower SE corner due to its symmetrical theme entry containing a black ice square on row 3 in the upper NW corner. So, I decided to put BLACK smack dab in the middle of the puzzle with ICE directly below it. This led to the B and the K of BLACK as unchecked letters, but I thought Will might allow it. However, as much as I liked the looks of this quirky grid, I just couldn't get good fill with 4 pairs of crossing hidden ICE theme entries, so we decided to give it a rest for awhile.

Fast forward to Nov. 2016…a year after our initial conversation and 8 grids later, I found that a simple change to a 16 x 15 grid appeared to solve all of our problems. I woke Loren up from her long nap with a surprise "COMPLETED BLACK ICE PUZZLE!" email so that she could work her Linguistics Major magic on the tweaking of fill words and cluing.

Thanks again, Loren — it was fun working with you!

TRACY: It was so much fun to team up with Jeff again for our second collaborative NYT Sunday puzzle!

I contacted Jeff last November with an idea I had been working on which crossed two colors through a shared rebus box to equal a third "mixed result" color, but I was struggling with how to represent the mixed result color in the grid that would make sense to the solver. I didn't want a lot of cross reference type clues, and a three-way rebus (has that ever been done before?) or a diagonally-running mixed result theme entry would be too confusing, IMO.

Not surprisingly, Jeff was able to think outside the proverbial (rebus) box concept and notice that certain pairs of colors shared a common letter where they could cross and "mix" with each other. For consistency, we picked four pairs of colors that included red, and from there, we came up with a list of colorful theme entries based on the final colors we had chosen. Lastly, we substituted the actual colors in the theme entries with one or the other mixing colors.

Jeff did the heavy duty grid work and placement of the theme entries, and we both shared in filling and cluing. The result, we hope, is a fun and lively Sunday puzzle. Enjoy!

JEFF: Such fun to work with Tracy! We went back and forth maybe 20 times before settling on this implementation. In case you missed it, an example is that RED + BLUE (RED crossing BLUE) = PURPLE, so you should interpret both crossing answers as the mixed color. Not RED PEOPLE EATER or BLUE HEARTS, but PURPLE PEOPLE EATER and PURPLE HEARTS! I've colorized the grid below to clarify.

It was hard to find enough well-known color mixes, and it turned out that almost all of them used RED. Both of us were worried about duplicating words in the puzzle, so I pushed us to use RED as a hidden word, i.e. within HIGHER EDUCATION, to avoid the outright duplications.

Thankfully, Tracy pushed back, pointing out that one way or another, we'd have duplicated answers — both the across and the down mixed color would be the same, i.e. PURPLE duplicated in (PURPLE) PEOPLE EATER / (PURPLE) HEARTS. If we're gonna have some duplication, why not go all out?

It took me a while to get used to that idea, but I liked it more and more every time I thought about it. Sort of a quantum duality. Very glad for Tracy's input there!

Curses!!

That's the theme of my puzzle — well, actually faux curses — which are often used in tv shows and cartoons to allow characters to appear to be swearing, while not upsetting the censors. Each theme entry is clued as a grawlix (a string of typographical symbols used to represent an obscenity or swear word) with the name of the actor or cartoon character most associated with uttering it.

The inspiration for the puzzle came from watching reruns of M*A*S*H and "Everybody Loves Raymond" and hearing Colonel Potter and Frank Barone, respectively, yell out their many faux profanities. I researched lists of minced oaths used in movies, tv shows, comics, cartoons, and books; watched and listened to clips of cartoons of Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, and others; and googled scripts from several tv show episodes to verify the spelling of the curse word(s).

Many thanks to Will and Joel for working with me through several theme entries to make sure that even the fake cuss words would not be bleeped by the NYT crossword censors!

My first Monday puzzle! The inspiration came from a little retail therapy at the mall with one goal in mind: FIND THE PERFECT JEANS. In the store, surrounded by the overwhelming choices of jean styles, fits, rises, etc., my crossword brain kicked into high gear and I quickly had some theme entries in mind, even before leaving the fitting room.

My first grid (not submitted) had a revealer of sorts with the Neil Diamond song "FOREVER IN BLUE JEANS" (18) broken up into two 9's and three styles of jeans as theme entries. My second grid, which I submitted, was rejected because (SLIM)SHADY was too similar to (SKINNY)DIP and (LOOSE)LIPS was overly generic, in terms of jean styles. However, the rejection came with the encouraging words "different and fun theme" and a note from Joel saying that he had come up with (BAGGY)EYES - which I loved. The next day, I came up with (RIPPED)ABS, (BOOT)DRIVE, and (CUTOFF)SAW, the latter of which Will felt was the best, plus it worked with my simple JEANS revealer, crossing at the "A."

So, that's the real skinny on this Labor Day puzzle — hope you enjoy the holiday and the puzzle!

TRACY: Two years ago, Mike Black and I collaborated on this concept but received a rejection due to inconsistencies with the theme. Mike's career was really taking off so he encouraged me to give it another try with a new constructor. The puzzle lay idle until I teamed up with Andrea this past April.

Our first version received a "we're interested" from Will and Joel but they wanted us to rework the puzzle and change our theme entries to include either two or three band names, not a mix of both, for consistency and elegance. Since most of our three band name entries were too long (THE CARS RUSH ONE DIRECTION (23)), we concentrated on crunching together two band names, striving for theme entries with the best "surface sense." I was sorry to have to drop THE POLICE QUIET RIOT from our approved theme set since we couldn't find another (18) for symmetry, and my own personal favorite, STRAY CATS CROWDED HOUSE, didn't make the cut.

One of the memorable moments during the construction process was writing to and getting a response from "The Pretenders" band asking for a definitive answer on whether or not their name included "the" or not. Their response: "The answer is there is no definitive answer! It is both and either!"

Also, working with Andrea was a hoot! Her quick wit and sense of humor, combined with her "naming" talent, came through loud and clear from San Fran to Baltimore in the multitude of emails we exchanged. Thanks, Andrea — so glad we BANDED TOGETHER!

ACME: When Tracy approached me to see if I would collaborate on her fun and bouncy Sunday idea, I couldn't have been more delighted, because I love thinking about themes and am less fond of creating the actual grid! Although we'd never met in person, we seemed to be on the same page as to what needed doing. My favorite discarded entry was a bit darker, i.e. "STRAY CATS POISON TOTO."

I mostly create Mondays, though I have had three or four Sundays with new papa Patrick Blindauer. This is my first (accepted) Sunday-sized collaboration with a woman — I asked Will if that was a first. (It's not, there have been five or six in the past, all involving the quiet, often-unsung heroine Nancy Salomon … though it's been almost ten years since it's been two gals on a Sunday).

There must have been 500 emails back and forth on this puzzle and I'm thrilled it's seeing the light of day! And as Dick Clark might say, I hope you find that it has a nice beat that you can dance to!

Sometimes, you just need one word to get your crossword constructing juices flowing. For me, that word was "MISSISSIPPI," the letters of which were spelled out big and bold on a TV ad I saw last March. I immediately noticed the repeated, consecutive three-letter strings in M(ISS)(ISS)IPPI and wondered if there were other words with the same pattern. Up until then, however, my search queries had all been simple — using letters, asterisks, and question marks.

Fortunately, my Google searches led me to the Regex Dictionary and I found the following formula: ($c$c$v)\1 — and then I just interchanged the "c's" (consonants) and "v's" (vowels) within the same formula to find more words using the on-line Regex Dictionary and also the one found on XWord Info. Surprisingly, there were not a lot of single words with this pattern so I was happy to be able to find nine such words to incorporate into phrases for a Sunday puzzle.

Although I did come up with my concept and title independently, I discovered during my word searches that John Farmer's 10/16/2014 NYT puzzle had the same basic concept, except his repeated three-letter strings were at the end of one word and the beginning of another (e.g. SCARLETTER). Therefore, I felt confident that my "original" theme idea was still unique and was thrilled that Will and Joel apparently felt the same way.

Construction-wise, however, they were less than thrilled with my original grid, saying it was overly segmented with too many 4 and 5-letter words. Of the 140 words I had in the original grid, 111 words were 3's (22), 4's (44), and 5's (45). By shortening two of my theme entries and moving some black squares around, I was able to open up the grid and reduce the number of 3, 4, and 5's to 81 words out of 138, and add some longer, more interesting fill.

Hope you enjoy my second solo Sunday puzzle!

Imagine for one moment that it's finally spring in your neck of the woods. The sun is shining and life is good. You're driving in your car, windows down, music blaring, when suddenly ... WHAM! You drive into an axle-busting, teeth-jarring pothole that snaps you out of your reverie and back to reality. Such was the inspiration this past spring for today's puzzle and my crossword interpretation of driving into a pothole — with C-A-R dropping down one block on the "A" (into an imagined pothole of sorts) and then coming back up to the row it was originally on.

Two options I considered while constructing the grid were to have C-A-R spelled as R-A-C, as though the car was traveling forward in the phrase from left to right, or to have the letters C-A-R span two words. However, I finally decided that the theme would be too difficult to suss out so I used two-word phrases that contained the word CAR in either the first or second word of the phrase.

Lastly, I found a fun tidbit of info while I was cluing. The inclusion of former New York Senator, Al D'Amato, at 16-Across was totally by coincidence, not knowing that his nickname was "Senator Pothole" while he was in office!