New York Times, Wednesday, June 2, 2021

It is quite a thrill to have my NY Times debut. It feels like a long time coming — I wrote my first puzzle back when I was in college in the '80s. I became more serious about constructing in the early 2000s but took about 15 years off before I caught the bug again in 2019.

I don't have too much to say about this particular puzzle. Once I had the idea, the theme entries came quickly as it is not hard to mine for words ending in STONE. I did have an early iteration with a looser theme set that allowed names (e.g., SHARON, OLIVER) and phrases (e.g., STEPPING, KIDNEY) before realizing I could tighten things up and use only closed compound words. Luckily, there were just enough 6-letter options (if you count CHERRYSTONE, my least favorite) to cover the east and west edges and plenty of shorter entries to complete the border.

One noteworthy feature of this puzzle (at least to me) is that it is one of the first grids I designed with Crosserville, a new web app I've been working on. My puzzles from 20 years ago were made with a very simple program that I hacked together, and I decided that my pandemic project would be to turn that old code into a more complete and user-friendly crossword construction tool.

I hadn't heard of the STONEWALL Inn until five years ago. Horrifying, that raid leading to so much violence against members of the LBGT community, but it's inspiring to see all the pride parades that have cropped up since then. A subject well worth commemorating for Pride Month.

The theme might elude some folks — those who nod that yes, there are HEADs in a graveyard, and that the centerpiece of a ring is a GEM. Nope! Well, yes. Sort of. Let me explain already!

This is a "perimeter puzzle," where all the answers around the edge are affected the same way. In today's case, the word STONE is implied at the end of each theme entry. Not HEAD, but HEADSTONE, not BIRTH, but BIRTHSTONE, etc.

These puzzles are notoriously difficult to fill since you end up working inward from four corners and have to knit those sections together in the middle. More often than not, one corner refuses to cooperate with the merge, and you have to start all over again.

This is even more difficult when you feature a central revealer like STONEWALL. Solid debut work, with a lot of interesting fill — HYSTERIA, OPEN A TAB both echoing the STONEWALL Inn and riots — and not too much BOL CRAT DTS stuff.

I would have liked a revision in the middle, though, with SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) crossing FATWA crossing FEN. Verges on unfair.

Will usually doesn't allow corner black squares on perimeter puzzles, so the SW and NE corners don't feel as elegant as they could have been. Additionally, CHERRY (STONE) isn't worth the price of the tightness Jesse mentioned. OLIVER or BAKING would have been much better.

Overall though, a solid entry in the annals of Pride Month puzzles.