New York Times, Tuesday, November 8, 2016

This puzzle was accepted back in January 2013. I was pleasantly surprised last week when I got an email saying the puzzle would run today, as I'd completely forgotten about it being in the queue.

It's hard to give too much insight into the construction since I made this puzzle about four years ago. I do remember I got this theme idea while driving to work and passing a realtor's sign for an OPEN HOUSE. I spent the rest of the ride thinking of prefixes for HOUSE, and luckily for me there were lots of options to make common phrases from. I then got fortunate to include a few extra of these theme entries from my list when the stacks worked at 17/20 and 55/61-across.

Will and Joel did change a good amount of clues for this puzzle (for the better!), but I'm glad they left my opening clue at 1-across, as "She's Leaving Home" has always been one of my favorite Beatles songs.

The Election Day crossword has big shoes to fill after the famous CLINTON/BOB DOLE puzzle, so despite not being as clever as that puzzle, I hope solvers nonetheless enjoyed this one today. If nothing else, I hope it served as a nice diversion from this year's polarizing election.

OPEN HOUSE used as a revealer today, indicating that both words in the theme entries can follow HOUSE: STATE BIRD = STATE HOUSE / BIRD HOUSE, TOLL ROAD = TOLLHOUSE / ROADHOUSE, etc. Interesting that Mike stacked pairs of themers like STATE BIRD over TOLL ROAD — rarely an easy task. And working in eight (!) themers is never easy.

I met Mike a few years back at the ACPT, and a conversation we had made me rethink some things. I had commented on ROTA in one of his puzzles, and he said that it actually was a really common term in golf. Sure enough, he was right.

That made me realize I was seeing "crossword glue" in very black-and-white terms, when gray was more appropriate. I still don't think ROTA is great in a mass-market puzzle, but ever since then, I've internally debated these questions much harder.

Some crossword glue is clear-cut, i.e. listings on editors' spec sheets: abbreviations (ATT, SESS, ONT, NSEC), esoteric-ish foreign words (SETTE, LITRE), old-school crosswordese (OLIO), etc. But something like ROILY? Hmm ...

A while back, SKYEY made a rare appearance, and I was on the fence about that one too. Brad Wilber, who edits the Chronicle of Higher Education, made a case that 1.) it's listed in all his dictionaries, not even as a variant and 2.) it gives variety that's potentially nice for solvers used to seeing the same short words all the time. After much thought, I still wouldn't use it or ROILY in one of my puzzles, but I like Brad's perspective.

Nice bonuses in PT BOAT, POTLUCK, NAME ONE, BIG CATS. Very hard to work in extras with so many themers, so that was appreciated.

Overall, I've seen this theme type enough that I think there has to be something extra for a puzzle of this genre to stand out. HOUSE is a little too easy to work with for my taste, and some of the themers (TOLL ROAD and ART STORE especially) were a little dry for my taste. But given that very few 15x crosswords ever go to eight themers, I like seeing an outlier every once in a while.