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I got good at making crosswords through (1) making a lot of them, and (2) reading detailed constructor's notes on XWord Info. So here's my attempt to provide (2) to other constructors.

The version of this puzzle I submitted had four rebus squares, resulting in a few dud themies (MISS TEMPLE) and a layout with 26 three-letter words. I am grateful to the Times for letting me submit a revamped grid with just three rebus squares.

Here are some stats:

-- I submitted this on August 10, 2021. Grid revisions took from November 5, 2021, through December 17, 2021, and then I received an official acceptance on January 7, 2022. It ran on March 2, 2023.

-- The themed puzzles I typically write are published for USA Today, and have around 35 cells of theme content. This puzzle had 62 cells of theme content, and the gridding process was eye-wateringly painful. Four layouts went back and forth with the Times' editing team, but I went through about twenty before submitting, even experimenting with 15x16 and 21x21 grids. (Rest In Peace THE TOOTHPASTE MILLIONAIRE.)

-- There are 76 clues in this puzzle. Twenty-four (32%) were kept identical. Twenty-one (28%) were updated slightly. Thirty-one (41%) are new. I'm glad they kept my references to the Baudelaires and "Let's Talk About Sex," and I'm sad that my clues about ESTE Haim and INS Choi were cut.

– puzzle by Malaika Handa

This idea first came to me during a brainstorming session with Jeff Chen back in 2018. We were tossing around concepts for puzzles to collaborate on, but the phonetic substitutions here struck Jeff as "probably a bit too out there." Fifteen months later, I was flying home to California from England just as Covid hit. Probably somewhere over Canada, I finished my work, but I still had plenty of laptop battery. So I dusted off the old idea and had a draft grid by the time LAX came into view. Life got in the way, and it was another couple of years before I could polish it up and send it to the NYT.

The themer set in the published puzzle is the same one from 2018 — I later thought of MAS(TERKEY) but it didn't fit, and never found something workable for "chicken" (maybe someone reading this will discover one!).

I dedicate this puzzle to my late father, Michael Levin, who passed away after it was completed. Over the past couple of years, he couldn't solve on paper due to vision problems but could still complete puzzles just from hearing the clues and visualizing the whole puzzle mentally. Incredible!

– puzzle by John-Clark Levin

Tons of compound words can be "flipped" to make a new unrelated term. HANG.OVER flipping to become OVER.HANG, say. The components --HANG and OVER — are unchanged, so it's not super interesting. I went looking for terms where the space between the components has to shift for the flip to work, so that one of the components is brand new to the equation. Adding an /s/ turned out to be the most reliable, consistent approach: TOOL.BARS flips to BAR.STOOL, and I liked how "stool" just shows up unexpectedly.

I was surprised at how few good candidates I could find with this property. Some from the discard pile included: HOT.POTS, HOT.BLOODS, WAY.SIDES, PACE.MAKERS, and WING.CHAIRS. Sometimes an extra /s/ suffix is needed to make a grid work; too many can feel like extra fluff in lieu of meatier vocabulary.

For this puzzle I liked how the added /s/ is the key to the gimmick. My original submittal greyed one side of each compound answer, as an option to make it easier to see the "sides". The editors went with no greyed squares; a bit harder, but hopefully fun and not frustrating.

– puzzle by Simeon Seigel

SAM: I used to write novels. Hours and hours each day, sitting in front of a computer, moving words around, so when it became clear that I had gone past my expiration date in that field, constructing seemed like a good fit for my particular, if peculiar, set of skills. And I've done a bunch of these now — all co-constructed with Jeff Chen, who I see as the Ted Lasso of crossword puzzles (knowledgeable, supportive, encouraging) — but "Mocktails" was an especially valuable learning lesson: solving should be a fun, enjoyable experience! Challenging, sure, but no showing off, forget the snark — keep it light, playful, and ultimately satisfying. Which, whatever day of the week we're aiming for, is not an easy task. Hope we achieved it here.

As a side note, how fitting to see that one of the entries is [Top-selling Girl Scout cookies]. It's that time of year, after all, and there are four boxes of these in the freezer and another at my ... wait, make that half a box .... Nope, sorry. Hey, did you know that you can also eat them frozen?

Anyway, my wife buzzes through these crosswords every day and is the one who first got me interested. Next big challenge for me is to one day beat her in solving. Or in tennis. Or pickleball. Scrabble. Ping-pong....

– puzzle by Sam Koperwas and Jeff Chen

For one glorious year of my early childhood, I went to daycare in a bowling alley. When we weren't perched on stools watching Sesame Street on the bar's TV, we got to hang out in the arcade and play all the classics.

Just a few decades later, I have my own kids and not just one, but two full-sized stand-up arcade machines in our house. This puzzle began with thoughts of Donkey Kong, one of my all-time favorites from those early days. The phrase, "over a barrel" occurred to me as a fun way to clue it, and the puzzle grew from there. Funny enough, that clue didn't even make the final cut.

Much appreciation goes out to my deeply supportive friends and family, especially my friend Dan who texts with me about the NYT crossword just about every single day. I hope that Marjorie Pedersen, who taught me crossword puzzle construction (for credit!) at Tufts University 29 years ago, will be proud of this debut.

– puzzle by Michael B. Berg

At some point (before seeing one rolling across the highway somewhere between Sedona and Phoenix), TUMBLEWEED became a common phrase in my household. At some other point, I realized it might make a good revealer by parsing TUMBLE as an anagram indicator for WEED. To elevate a standard hidden anagram theme, I used this mechanism so that the WEEDs are rolling not only within their entries, but also visually throughout the grid. Happy Thursday!

Please check out These Puzzl3s Fund Abortion (TPFA3), a pack of crossword puzzles created around the belief that everyone should have access to safe and affordable abortion care. Constructed by an all-star group of puzzlemakers and editors who are passionate about Reproductive Justice, TPFA3 contains 16 original, brand-new puzzles centered around social and reproductive justice themes. Presale is open, and puzzles will be available on March 28 — visit https://fund.nnaf.org/tpfa3 to donate now.

– puzzle by Rebecca Goldstein

I don't know Python (yet), so to find words that could potentially be split to invent new two-word phrases, I reverted to Stata, the only coding language I know, thanks to my day job as an economist. It produced quite a lot of potential matches, but most of those had to go in the bin for being uninteresting, clunky, lacking in good symmetrical partners or (in the case of "sacredness") unlikely to pass the ick test no matter how you clue it.

My notes on the puzzle over on Wordplay have a few that were closer to making the submission. My favourite clue that didn't make it was [German for kindergarten, say?] for ETYMOLOGY, but I like the replacement [Word has it!] too. I was glad that [More than just a sec?] survived for BRUT.

One point of trivia that came up in the cluing discussion was whether XANDER was Buffy's best friend. We opted for "friend" out of deference to Willow. But Buffy fans can debate!

A word to the wise — the puzzle actually got accepted in July of 2022, but I was none the wiser for six months, thanks to an overzealous spam filter!

– puzzle by Robert Ryan

The idea for this puzzle started with BANANA SPLIT, which got me thinking about two-word phrases that combined foods and synonyms for "leave." When brainstorming themes, I normally jot down anything tangentially relevant, knowing that I can try to tighten the theme later.

My first couple finds included CHICKEN RUN and SUGAR RUSH, but it wasn't until coming up with TOFU SCRAMBLE that I realized I should focus specifically on different foods/dishes. I also considered various DIPs (ONION DIP, TACO DIP, etc.), but I felt like these were more arbitrary and depended on slang that might be less immediately evident to solvers.

A thing I love about creating crosswords is how they present an opportunity to reflect and refract my own experiences. TOFU SCRAMBLE was a dish introduced to me by a vegan friend, and CINNAMON ROLL was suggested by my partner when I was talking through potential themesets with her. And the clue about [What the fish said when it swam into a concrete wall] was appropriately inspired by a joke my dad used to make. (My nine-year-old self's answer to this joke, after hearing Dad further talk about visiting "Hoover shh" during a trip to Nevada, was an earnest "shh it.")

This puzzle experienced a quick turnaround — I submitted the final version on November 8, 2023.

– puzzle by Adam Vincent

The version of this puzzle I originally submitted to the Times had five theme entries and only one movie title for each clue. The editors thought just one title might be a bit too tough, which I think was the right call. They also asked if I could try a version without TRADE SHOW ["Freaky Friday"?], the weakest themer of the original set.

I went back to the drawing board (thesaurus.com page for "movie") and was very happy to realize FLICK OF A SWITCH could work — not only as part of a 14-letter symmetrical pair, but with the exact same clue. Losing TRADE SHOW also meant losing my favorite entry, CLING FILM ["Free Solo?"], but what can you do.

As far as the fill goes, I'm happy about MILE TIME and ZIP TIE. I can't decide if the (unintentional) repeating letter stack in the NW corner is fun or distracting, but it's a bit late to worry about that now. I'm just psyched for this to be published!

– puzzle by Madeline Kaplan

Hello Puzzledom! This one has been in the hopper for a long time. Very excited to see it in print. I've always loved crosswords where the acrosses (usually rebuses) read differently than the downs. I did this in December, 2015 with a DIE/DICE puzzle. Probably my favorite example of this is Francis Heaney's legendary flags Sunday puzzle from 2010.

There was some debate on whether or not to have a revealer or a note that tells you how to unlock this puzzle. I'm pleased that the solver will need to figure out the key phrase. I hope you all find it a challenging and satisfying aha moment!

Construction of this puzzle was not easy. I endeavored to have more ONEs that broke up as O - NE or ON - E, but it was virtually impossible with so much thematic content. The ONE phrases needed to be short and there was a dearth of words that were both short and broke up in such a way. I found the best way to to construct this grid was to isolate those rebus squares. Also, I am quite pleased that I only have a single ONE that I use as the number one (AS ONE).

A small plug: I'll be performing The Enigmatist at the Kennedy Center in June 2023. If you're in the area, please join me for a night of puzzling and magic!

Thanks for solving, everyone!

– puzzle by David Kwong

I originally designed this puzzle with only vertical groups of blocks, which I think is more visually striking than the published horizontal groups. But I feared that all the short across entries would make the puzzle play too fast for those who start on the across clues (most people, right?). Those who start with downs might, on their first pass, wonder where all the long entries are (the longest down entry is only six letters). Downs-only solvers should do acrosses-only to make this one tougher.

I hope the puzzle still plays hard enough with the shorter entries running side-by-side throughout the grid — that's definitely a risk with this construction. The horizontal block groups also means that the number of across entries is low — twenty-one. Maybe this puzzle suggests a new XWordInfo stat category (!) — fewest entries in one direction.

As a themeless puzzle solver, I often get stumped by long proper nouns; as a themeless puzzle constructor, I try not to include them. I'm mostly successful here. AMSTERDAMAVENUE doesn't fit the bill . . . but I appreciate the editorial team's revision of my original clue because it includes info (Dutch roots) that points toward the answer even if you've never heard of that particular Manhattan thoroughfare.

– puzzle by Blake Slonecker

TRENT: As the author of several children's novels featuring puzzles and riddles, I might reasonably be assumed to be a long-time fan of crosswords, but my love for them came late — only a few years ago, really, when Simon first began constructing. Our conversations about the process revealed similarities between what he was doing and I was doing — the wordplay, the misdirection, the pleasure in creating something satisfying to solve — and we agreed it would be fun to collaborate on a puzzle one day.

We made no definite plan, but occasionally I'd have an idea about a theme and ask Simon if anyone had done one like it. If the idea was promising, it inevitably had been done. If it weren't promising (or even feasible), Simon would diplomatically explain why. But eventually, I had an idea with potential, Simon said he'd tinker around with it, and the next thing I knew, we were cluing the puzzle. It was great fun to work on, and I'm delighted to see our first collaboration appear in the NYT.

SIMON: Since they didn't make the cut, I recommend solving to the Talking Heads' This Must Be the Place.

– puzzle by Simon Marotte and Trenton Lee Stewart