New York Times, Saturday, November 3, 2018

This odd-looking grid was the result of an experiment to find some new themeless grid shapes. It began with the thought, "what would happen if I cut the grid almost entirely in half?" and morphed into the vaguely circular shape with wide open quadrants you see today. But boy was this puzzle a chore! It was one of my first attempts in sub-64-word grids, and as such took many, many hours to fill cleanly.

I submitted the grid, and got an acceptance contingent on replacing an entry in the SW quadrant. I worked to fix this and was able to get an OK-looking bottom half after needing to replace a good chunk of the grid due to the high interlock of the entries. The editing team initially accepted the changes, but challenged me further to make the bottom half more interesting, which had gotten duller in the redo. So, I went back and ended up tearing out and refilling the entire bottom half of the grid…again…to finally get the puzzle you see today.

The grid itself is unusual in that it only really has 4 long slots, yet a metric ton of 7-letter entries (24!) With that many mid-length words in this limiting grid design, they couldn't all be winners. Though, the SAT tutor in me enjoyed the preponderance of vocab words (NEONATE, APPARAT, IGNOBLE, STYGIAN.) The longer slots could have been a bit more exciting, but overall this grid was very instructive for me in learning to work with constrictive grid designs. At the time I said I wouldn't attempt another sub-64-word grid for a while, but I've since broken that several times over…

I hope, if anything, you enjoy the variety that a weird puzzle like this provides, and the story of its somewhat painful journey to fruition.

Ooh, a wide-open 62-worder! A daunting construction challenge! The SW / NE corners are hard enough — 4x7 stacks, not at all segmented from the rest of the puzzle.

And the opposite corners? It takes some serious guts to tackle areas as big as those. Themeless constructors can usually rely on a dab of short crossword glue here or there, helping to hold their feature entries together. But take a closer look at that NW corner. There are virtually no short slots! Impossible to slip in a CUL or a SIL when every darn entry is mid-length or more.

What, AND there are four long entries locking the grid skeleton in place? Hatchi matchi! Talk about an uber-duber-challenge.

I was mighty impressed that Ryan was able to use such lively feature entries — ANTIVAXXERS is such a neat-looking string of letters. (Not so neat are the anti-vaxxers themselves, harrumph.) Loved DORA THE EXPLORER and SAINT PETERSBURG, too. Not personally taken by DEE DEE MYERS, especially with her oh-so-friendly constructor-friendly letters, but she works.

It's so difficult (impossible?) to escape a whoppingly-gigantic corner without a CAPEMAN. Or SERENER (more serene?). Or UNIPED (un-ip-ed = no IP address, ha ha). Or a NON HERO. These are all real, dictionary-supported things — and likely not at all odd to some (I can already hear Paul Simon fans' outrage). But to me, they're not nearly as juicy as APPARAT, AMUSE ME, STYGIAN, IGNOBLE.

There's much subjectivity here. But AMUSE ME is at least figure-out-able if you haven't heard someone say that. CAPEMAN, not so much.

Mighty fine fill overall. Especially given the immense level of difficulty, I considered this one for the POW! It just gave me one too many moments of pause to get it to the promised land.