New York Times, Saturday, October 17, 2015

There have been a few recent puzzles with blanks as part of the solution. David Kwong's DRACULA. Jim Hilger's "Breaks." Even Miss Trunchbull — I mean, Jeff Chen (and his wife) — had SPACE BAR. Those were all great.

This basis for this idea actually came from a much older one: Manny Nosowsky's 2000 April Fools' Day puzzle, whose entire perimeter consisted of the letter T. Looking at that grid, I tried to come up with other tricky ways a perimeter might be utilized.

What about literal spaces, or blanks? BLANKS has lots of meanings, both as a noun and a verb. Better yet, it could be also clued as a proper. When the phrase OUTER SPACE, a fitting revealer, sprang to mind, I hoped I was onto something. Usually I'm not.

The best part about making this was generating a list of 13s and seeing what would interlock. That was loads of fun, because there was a huge reservoir to draw from. An earlier draft's successful interlock had "hard" science fiction entries like EVENT HORIZONS and GAMMA RAY BURSTS, but those were pretty literal, and not at all receptive to playful cluing. These four entries were the most colorful and varied set.

Some of my favorite new clues are those for LUNAR ECLIPSES, AD LIB and SLOGAN. Among the originals, I like CONSTELLATION, DOO-WOP, TENANT, ALI and ALIEN INVASION. It's cool that the Scrabble clue for BLANKS remains in a 6-letter slot, hinting at ?-TILES or a written-in BLANKS. ASSIZES is a word I learned on my first day of Torts. Well, my first day, and everyone else's second. Oops. Elle Woods I was not.

The five other puzzles this week have been fantastic. I'm thrilled, and very lucky, to have been included along with them.

Loved this one; a perfect way to cap off my favorite theme week since the amazing Patrick Berry puzzle suite back in 2011. I've seen OUTER SPACE interpreted many ways in crosswords (phrases starting with SP and ending with ACE, having the word SPACE outside the grid, etc.) but nothing quite like this. Tim's version of OUTER / SPACE includes a ring of blanks all around the perimeter, which visually represents that "region beyond the Kármán line" (an astronomy term). So cool!

I cottoned to the idea quickly (Billy BLANKS is awesome), but what a bonus to get thematic(ish) material in what I expected to be a themeless! The quartet of CONSTELLATION, USS ENTERPRISE, LUNAR ECLIPSES, and ALIEN INVASION would be too loose for a themed puzzle, but it makes for a great mini-theme. And I'm fascinated by the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), so I liked seeing that. SOL was fun too, especially since it's the term for a Mars day. ("The Martian" was one of my favorite reads of the year so far.)

Nice execution on the 13x13 grid, too. I had a tough time recalling LAPUTA from "Gulliver's Travels" and ASSIZES made for an impossible crossing for me, but I liked it enough to ignore that blip. Getting APE SUIT and AFC EAST and some ARCANA SLOGAN ALL SET stuff was nice, all with just a FAIN to hold it together. FAIN is pretty outdated crossword to me, but since it's the only piece of short glue, I didn't mind so much.

I also liked that Tim found so many ways to clue BLANKS. It did feel repetitive to me after a while though, and given that each one of those could have been a synonym of BLANKS like EMPTIES or VOIDS, some variety might have been fun. Not having to intersect those answers with anything sure opens up a lot of freedom! I suppose there is a certain consistency and elegance to having all BLANKS, though.

A great end to this theme week; clever concept with good execution. I always like seeing constructors do crazy and unique things, and Tim's mind-bending concept is perhaps the best of the best this week.