New York Times, Monday, January 6, 2020

We are a mother/daughter team. Tess, the millennial, does the Times puzzle online, while Kathy, the boomer, prefers pencil and paper. This is our first published puzzle ever — but our fourth submission to the New York Times.

The theme came to Kathy in the middle of the night, when she couldn't sleep — as do many of our themes. Note to insomniacs: this is NOT a very good way to lull yourself back to sleep. Why birthstones? The only thing we can think of is that Kathy had a costume jewelry business as a teenager and so memorized the birthstone for each month. But it turns out that if you Google "birthstones," each month has four or five, which gave us a scare after we had filled in the grid. "Wait, June's birthstone is alexandrite, not pearl?"

We originally had the word "schlepps" in the southeast corner but Will Shortz and Joel Fagliano pointed out that the proper spelling of "schlepps" only has one "p" and asked that we change it. It felt like a lost cause to Kathy — what other word ends with "pps"? But Tess immediately came up with a new fill using "schnapps," requiring minimal other changes.

We're thrilled to be making our debut! Hopefully it won't be our swan song as well …

I suppose I'll have to settle for my daughter being the second Tess published in the NYT crossword. Get your butt in gear, said the tiger dad to his five-year-old!

I kid. Sort of.

Despite my spite, I admired so much about this double-debut puzzle. Tess and Kathy managed to distinguish their effort from other hidden GEM, birthstone, rock-themed etc. crosswords I've seen. Three notable points:

• There are so many different birthstone listings out there, many of which include exotic gems like peridot, alexandrite, tanzanite. Although these are fun-sounding words, they'd elude a large swath of newer solvers. Sticking to basic stones that most everyone will know is perfect.
• Check out Wikipedia's list of birthstones. Note how Tess and Kathy focused on the most relevant sub-list, the 2019 US one. They could have easily branched out to draw from everything — CARNELIANS or CATS EYES might have been useful — but focused, making the theme tight.
• Most of the time, they concentrated their hidden letters, taking pairs at a time whenever they could. TH and ST within AMETHYSTS is fantastic, because it lends an elegance that wouldn't have been present if T H S T had been strewn about one by one.

It's far from a dense theme — 40 theme squares is much lower than average — so I'd expect a squeaky-clean grid packed chock-full of color. Solid performance on the latter criterion, with so much SCHNAPPS WASHED UP ARUGULA CABANAS MYSTERY SCANDAL SEA SLUG material. It's rare to get so much mid-length snazzy fill on a Monday, and it was a solving pleasure.

The cleanliness factor needed improvement. Monday puzzles ought to be uber-welcoming to solvers of all levels, and crossings like ELMIRA / ELIA and RES / RANI can scare people off. Along with an inelegant collection of AGT ASA EEG ERG and VAR at the important 1-D spot, it needed another round of revision. Having a central 9-letter entry does create a lot of filling difficulty, but with so few theme constraints, both color and clarity are achievable.

Overall, a debut that I enjoyed more and more as I studied and thought about the themer choices. It would have been great to get an additional layer of clever wordplay, maybe playing on STRATA (rock layers!) + GEM = STRATAGEM, but that could have pushed it into mid-week territory.