I'm a THEMELESS JUNKIE (15). This isn't news to the real ones who've solved my stuff for years. According to XWord Info, more than 60% of my standard, non-variety crossword publications have appeared on a Friday or Saturday.
This puzzle today feels different, though. I'd always been so interested in the "How low can you go?" word count quests or asking myself, "How wide open can I possibly make this corner while still retaining good fill?" This pattern of so many shorter interlocking 7s, a classic grid skeleton, never appealed much to me as a constructor. Give me a challenge! Force me to use my imagination to pull off a technical marvel! My solvers deserve a formidable-looking Saturday, which would then be extra satisfying to solve!
Whew, was this grid a challenge, all right. A challenge to make every last 6-, 7-, 8- and 9-letter answer fresh, peculiar and/or fun to clue. A challenge to pack so much juice into each corner without relying on overfamiliar, pedestrian answers like ESTATES or TSETSES, or short gluey bits to hold the longer pizazz together. I'm not saying every last one of these is so sparkly (looking at you, GATEMAN and CARTAGE … and, believe me, it hurts to use DERE!), but hopefully nothing here makes you deep sigh and say, "I'm so damn tired of seeing this in puzzles."
To aspiring constructors taking notes: My strategy mostly revolved around using answers in the middle of the stacks that, well, you'd be surprised to find in the middle while solving. Answers like A LA MODE and ENTENTE traditionally appear in slots like 15-Across, to hold together zippier 7s on either side. So I hunched that if I, for instance, stacked the Scrabble-icious™ GROUCHY under POP QUIZ, it'd lead to fresher results with rarer letter combos. Or, if I needed to use something vowel-heavy, I'd resort to a new, cool-to-learn word like ÉCORCHÉ.
Finally, I've brought this up before, but it was delightful to bake in common words like ETHICS, TAXING, ENERGY, PIGTAIL, PRICES, DATING / PETUNIA / INEXACT, etc. They allowed me to kick back and have a blast with tricky, evocative and/or wordplay-inspired cluing. I know many constructors are interested in highlighting flashy names and elements of modern pop culture — myself included — but this I highly recommend as well!