New York Times, Friday, November 16, 2018

I began this puzzle by seeding the 66-Across entry and building the SE stack. Ironically, the one entry that Will and Sam asked me to change before they accepted it was...you guessed it...66-Across. The SE corner you see now is my second effort.

The most basic themeless pattern starts with a set of triple-stacked mid-length answers (8-10 letters) in each of the four corners. You don't want to totally separate them from each other, because that makes for choppy flow for solvers. But the more separation, the better — it's so much easier to construct an individual corner when it doesn't affect what's going on in the other three corners.

Running a grid-spanner through the middle makes things so much harder. Wouldn't seem so, perhaps. What's the problem of starting to nail two of the corners into place? NO BIGGIE, right?

It's surprising how much more difficult it is to fill a single corner with just a couple of letters fixed in. But the WHI- of WHITE BLOOD CELLS makes things tougher because of the W, restricting choice a great deal.

And even the -LLS at the end — you'd think that the letters are common enough that it wouldn't take away many options at all. But using two consonants together adds difficulty, messing up the preferred pattern of vowel-consonant alternation that makes things easier on constructors.

I like Kyle's decision to add "cheater squares" at the ends of SNO-CAPS. Eating away at the margins of the grid makes filling so much easier, probably a factor of two or even three in the SW / NE corners. I don't mind the visual either, although Rich Norris over at the LAT has said that he wants constructors to avoid black squares in the corners of themelesses.

It's a tough construction, and Kyle did well to keep it generally free of short crossword glue. I wish there had been a bit more sizzling stuff like DONUT HOLE and SLIME MOLD though — stuff like THREE STAR and SHOUTING aren't that exciting — but NO BIGGIE.

Still, a solid grid.