New York Times, Monday, August 30, 2021

In her Lollapuzzoola interview a week and a half ago, the peerless Robyn Weintraub said "I don't know that there's a single well-established constructor who doesn't look back on puzzle #1 and cringe — and you're supposed to; that means you've gotten better." While I'm far from well-established, I'm certainly feeling this right now about today's puzzle — one of my very first, written ~15 months ago — and apologize to any solvers who have come to associate my byline with cleaner fill than you see here.

The grid is (alas) all mine but note that only ~15 of the 76 clues are. For something constructed more recently, you can also check out my USA Today puzzle today with the great Adesina O. Koiki, which is at a similar difficulty level.

When I sent the above to Jim and Jeff, they replied and asked me what I'd change and why. A few answers that stand out in an ugly way to me are SEA TRIP (this does not feel like an in-the-language phrase), RESEEK (I have never heard anyone actually add the prefix "re-" to "seek"), and AMORS (I mistakenly thought this was a Spanish plural) — and that's certainly not the full list.

While I do think this was a fairly ambitious geometry — especially in the northwest and southeast corners — for an already tough-to-grid theme set full of X's and K's, from where I stand now I personally don't think that the highs in, e.g., the northwest corner outweigh the lows of ORIN (originally clued as Aquaman), GO BALD (originally clued as a voluntary style choice), and O ROMEO (this feels like a contrived bunch of convenient letters to me). Otoh, I don't actually mind ARA, which still has my submitted clue and is a shoutout to my dad.

Haters call these A E I O U themes "vowel movements," but I enjoyed having this old friend stop by after a long absence. As Andrea Carla Michaels has said, there's a poetic quality to vowel progressions, a sing-song lilt. It's fitting that they end with a long "ooh" sound.

Wait. Shouldn't that be a "you" sound? Like this one ought to end with LIEU? That's what I used to think, but vowel progressions have developed their own "standards" over the years, and most all of them end with "ooh."

Another "rule" they typically have followed is that all five words are either stand-alone, or all five sounds are integrated into a single word. Here, LACKS and LEXINGTON aren't consistent. However, a mixture of two stand-alones (LACKS, LICKS), two integrations (LEXINGTON, LUXEMBOURG), and a quasi-parsing (LOCKSMITH, the S shifts away from SMITH) is a reasonable solution.

I appreciate that this one flaunts another aspect of the vowel progression canon, that vowel progressions must use long vowel sounds. There's no hard-and-fast reason for that. It's elegant that every theme answer today incorporates a short sound.

(Although, my French friends down the street are preparing to storm the Bastille, pronouncing the last one "loohks-em-bourg." Ooh, ooh!)

Some tough vocab, with not only AMORS but RECTO and OVULE perhaps tricky for early-week solvers. That is completely subjective, but there is a lot of short fill that's called out on editors' specs sheets, i.e. partial OR IN, RE- addition in RESEEK, the AHL, etc. I might have tried to break up the big NW/SE corners to make the solve friendlier and smoother, but I can see the benefits of working in the delightful INTRICACY and snazzy FOOT MODEL.

And I appreciate Brooke looking back on her own work with a humble eye. That's a quality all great constructors possess.

Brooke's point on GO BALD is well-taken. It's funny when I say "chrome dome" about myself. I hesitate to say it to other guys, though. My (identical twin) brother is still attempting the combover. I try to be sympathetic, but ...

Nice addition to the genre; I enjoyed the change of pace of all short vowel sounds.