New York Times, Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Will mentioned earlier this year that he was running low on easy, smooth Monday puzzles, so I thought I'd write one. LIKE synonyms camouflaged in phrases felt like a simple enough idea ... and wouldn't LIKE MINDED make a great revealer!

Monday puzzles sometimes bore me, though, so I wanted to do something more interesting with this one. What if I added more elements — instead of four themers, how about five? Good, but the set I found meant that three synonyms would be at ends of phrases and two at beginnings. That felt inelegant.

Hey, how about using mirror symmetry to put all the key words in the middle of the puzzle? That fortuitously worked out, and then while I was building the grid, I thought it would be fun to make it a wide-open grid, with themeless-like corners. Some testing showed I could do it without resorting to much crossword glue, so I figured it could make for a more an interesting solve.

Sometimes I ought to listen to my own advice, though. As a constructor, I really enjoyed putting this grid together, what with entries like OR NURSE (nurse specializing in operating room work), DOORMEN, HOT DATE, FORGERS, IM COOL, GAL PAL, etc. And STIPPLE is such an interesting word.

But I presented Will a dilemma — with a Monday-like theme and a themeless-like grid, what day of the week should it run on? If a Monday, would a novice solver know what STIPPLE means (much less understand a clever clue for it)? And would someone who doesn't do that many crosswords appreciate the bizarre looking ORNURSE string of letters, or get completely confused?

So there you have it, my easy-breezy Monday puzzle … running on a Wednesday.

It really is a wonder that anyone ever listens to me.

Everything came together so nicely for this low word-count grid ... except for an unfortunate ??N?V pattern at the left side of the grid. ANNIV came immediately to mind, but I didn't care at all for that abbreviation. I did some brainstorming and wondered if there had been a famous queen, Anne the Fifth (ANNE V)? Came as a complete surprise to me that there's a very popular model named ANNE V.

Should I have gone with ANNIV? I debated this one for days. ANNIV felt so ugly, and the more I read up on ANNE V, the more crossworthy she seemed, having risen to the highest levels of the modeling world. And it's kind of cool to have that bizarre ANNEV string, not knowing how to parse it. I had a feeling she would be a toughie for many, so I tried my best to make the crossings very easy, so she wouldn't hold up people's ability to achieve a correct solve.

Still hard to figure out if I made the right decision. I'm sure there will be some who disagree, but I'm equally sure that there would have been grumbling (probably more so) about ANNIV. I could have also gone with just four themers, but that seemed too thin. Given that it's a pretty straightforward theme type, I felt that having five themers would help give the puzzle a meatier feel.

Always the trade-offs!