New York Times, Thursday, April 25, 2019

It's a great honor to make my New York Times crossword debut with a puzzle I had so much fun putting together! I'm a veterinarian who has been addicted to crossword puzzles for 30 years, since picking up my first issue of GAMES magazine when I was 7. After getting some puzzles published in GAMES in college, I wanted to make a more serious effort to get my work into the New York Times. All of my early rejections thankfully came with some helpful feedback. Thanks to Will for giving this puzzle a thumbs up, to Dave, Lily, and Mom for test solving, and especially to Nancy Salomon for some excellent mentorship during the constructing process!

I decided it would be a novel idea to build a puzzle around an emoticon — I toyed with a few different ideas for working in a smiley face, such as fitting it into a single square rebus-fashion or placing it into a few themed entries to replace the word HAPPY. In the end, I decided to place it dead center, and use the other theme entries to hint at the gimmick. It worked out nicely that EYES, NOSE, and MOUTH dovetailed into some decent Down rebus entries, and the fact that COLONHYPHEN / PARENTHESIS worked as symmetrical descriptors sealed the deal.

A few of my original clues may have been too iffy for a Thursday, or for the difficulty of their crossings ("Rocky landing?" for PLYMOUTH; "Change for good?" for TIP JAR), and were changed accordingly, so I'll have to keep that in mind going forward.

Hope this was a fun solve, and I look forward to rolling out some more puzzles in the near future!

Many moons ago, I submitted an EMOTICON puzzle to Will, using a double O rebus for EYES, an I for a NOSE, and a U for a MOUTH (the three squares on top of each other). It sort of looked like a HAPPY FACE if you cocked your head and squinted. And if I paid you ten dollars. Needless to say, Will politely rejected it.

OO

I

U

Yeah, that doesn't work.

Even having spent umpteen-fifty hours doing that, AND today receiving what seemed like hit-me-over-the-head hints in COLON HYPHEN and PARENTHESIS, I still got stuck like a duck in the center. The timer ticked away as I sweated, wondering why DOT DOT or COLON wasn't fitting at the start of 39-Across.

Delightful a-ha when I realized it was EYES! Clever double-interpretation, using COLON in one place and an EYES rebus in another.

Good gridwork, especially for a debut. I wasn't keen on A HAND NOICE (I think that's what Jake Peralta says on "Brooklyn Nine-Nine," stretching out the word "nice"?) or SSR, but that's not much for a grid with so many things going on.

(NO ICE makes more sense of course, as a different meaning of ["Neat"]. But I do love me some Jake Peralta.)

HORST was also a baffler, but I could more easily excuse that in the service of the center, a strong triplet in EYESORE / PIANO SEATS / PLYMOUTH.

There was even a little VIP ROOM and TIP JAR to spice things up.

I'm suffering from a touch of rebus fatigue, having seen so many of them, but I appreciate when a rebus does something fresh. For that great lightbulb moment when I finally broke open the center of the puzzle, I'm giving out something rare today: a POW! on a debut. Well done, Jon!