New York Times, Thursday, August 18, 2016

I'd had TEMPE/RAMEN/TALLY kicking around my brain for a while but hadn't come across any other similarly patterned wordplay. Jeff and I both live in Seattle and every so often meet up for coffee and to talk crossword shop. I mentioned it to him one day and he suggested we use the power of programming to generate some other potential examples. We each took a crack at finding 15-letter words that could be split into 5/5/5 or 4/5/6 or 4/4/7 etc. After sifting through a bunch of junk, we settled on these three.

Here are a few alternates that didn't quite make the cut:

• HYPER/CRITIC/ALLY
• INTER/MEDIA/TING
• TOUGH/MINDED/NESS
• LIEU/TENANTS/HIPS
• APP/RENT/ICES/HIPS
• STAND/OF/FISH/NESS

The first version we submitted included the revealer THE SPLITS clued as [Show of flexibility ... and what 16−, 25−, and 40−Across each do]. It was deemed to be not such a great addition to the main theme so we decided to rework the puzzle. With only three theme entries, we tried to construct a wide-open grid with as much fresh fill as possible. Hope you all enjoy the result!

And, as many others have said, it's a great pleasure to work with Jeff!

It's a lot of fun living near puzzle people. The ideas Parker and I pass back and forth don't always go anywhere, but when he showed me how beautifully TEMPERAMENTALLY broke into TEMPE RAMEN TALLY, it felt like the seed of a nice idea. However, after a quick scan through my list of 15-letter entries, I couldn't find anything that worked nearly as nicely.

Both of us are recreational programmers (me much hackier than Parker, who actually works in the field). It occurred to me that his TEMPE/RAMEN/TALLY seed idea might be a fun project to expand my coding skills, and after a few attempts, I figured out a way to pare down my list into a subset that might be reasonably human-scannable. Et voila, the other two popped out! (After about 10 hours of line-by-line searching.) HYPER CRITIC ALLY was also a possibility, but it wasn't nearly as nice, as it didn't change the "critic" meaning at all.

To the credit of Parker's programming skills, he came up with these ... and a bunch of others (mentioned above). Shows you what I know!

I thought THE SPLITS was so clever, such a neat way to sum up this idea! Parker wasn't convinced, but he reluctantly agreed to go along. We went back and forth with the tough construction, a mirror symmetry 15/15/15/9, and came up with something we really liked. It had so many great pieces of fill like I, ASIMOV, CAT TOYS, SO SORRY, BARTEND, etc.!

Will and Joel liked the general idea ... but felt like THE SPLITS wasn't apt. I wrote to Parker, asking what sort of idiotic ninny would come up with such a ridiculous revealer. (Again, shows you what I know.)

So, it was a complete redo, but we saw it as an opportunity to create something we liked even more — a 15/15/15 with a themeless word count. Not easy to do, but it was a fun challenge to see how many colorful long answers we could work into the grid while keeping the gluey short answers to a minimum. I always like to feature long fill, so hopefully things like Superman getting a SPRAY TAN in a BLIND ALLEY behind the DAILY PLANET while drinking a WET MARTINI enhanced the quality of your solve.