New York Times, Friday, December 5, 2014

I did this one the (sort-of) good old-fashioned way — by hand. I say "sort of" because I didn't quite use pencil and graph paper, but Microsoft Excel. I think I might have singlehandedly crashed onelook.com at one point during the construction process, if not worn out the "?" key on my keyboard. This had been one of the odder crossword goals of mine, to get a freestyle hand-constructed puzzle published. I'm glad I did it, because I have gained a completely new respect for those folks who did this before computers were a thing … and for the few of those who still don't use them. It's hard to keep away from crosswordese when doing it this way.

I'd be pointing out the obvious by saying that the whole thing started with 1-Across; when you're building these things manually, you really have to have a definitive seed answer at a definitive position. Happily, Will loved the answer I put there. It progressed (slowly) from NW to NE, through the center to the SW, and then to the SE.

As the hand-constructing process goes, the black square arrangement went through myriad changes to make this thing work; I wasn't even originally planning on having a grid-spanning entry in the middle, but it just kinda worked out that way after building the NE. The SE was the painstaking part — I had to do it twice. There was one particular entry (BADASS) that I thought may have been OK for the Times, but Will didn't quite feel the same way. (There were a few other iffy entries in that corner that pushed it over the edge, too.) So, true to form, I revised it the same way (it took another four weeks, on and off) until I got it into its final form.

(Shameless plug: I'm gonna be doing my own crosswordy thing at least once a week. It's like I've given myself my own playground now!)

Some beautiful long entries today. The NW and SE stacks contain such goodness! Six answers, all pure gold. A colloquial bit in GOD I HOPE NOT, something newer in the ITUNES STORE, a hippish guy in STEVE CARELL and another one for previous generations in EVEL KNIEVEL (with its A+ clue!). That's some great feature entry work.

I ended up finishing with an error due to a devilish clue for TENET than made me outthink myself (not hard, really). [Canon element] had to be tricksy, right? Surely the printer brand Canon was hidden in plain sight at the beginning of the clue? So with the T and the N in place already, I plunked down TONER. I figured RELEASE DARE was one of those things I'm not hip enough to understand (that's a big universe). And it was so EVEL KNIEVEL sounding. D'oh! Fun to be caught by my own "brilliance."

Ah, the old issue of excessive three-letter words. There is one case where I actually like seeing a lot of 3s, and that is when going to such a high three-letter word count means that there's way more long fill in the grid than usual. If the average word length stays roughly the same, more shorter words means more longer words, yeah?

And if this isn't the case, I think the frustration of the choppy solve brought by excessive 3s can be mitigated by making them as unnoticeable as possible. Avoiding unsavory glue like ENE, GIE, ITE, NOE, and the curious BIS would go a long way toward that.

I usually don't mind one or maybe two things like S AND L and B TWO (entries which are never seen in real life this way). One is kind of fun; kind of tricksy, making the solver think outside the box. Getting two of the same type, B TWO and A TEN, was not ideal. I would have much preferred A TEN being clued as the (somewhat esoteric) Egyptian sun god, although I can understand why Will chose the riskier path, in hopes of squeaking A TEN by.

Some beautiful clues really enhanced my solving pleasure, though. OTTER's clue made me worried, thinking about a different type of "oyster cracker" and why it might be furry. Great repurposing of the term. And GOWNS, TREE RINGS, even ELS twisted my brain around, producing great moments of clarity when the answers finally fell into place.

All in all, a puzzle on one end of the spectrum, one with a lot of sizzling entries made possible by enough glue to hold them together.