New York Times, Tuesday, February 18, 2014

I first came up with the idea for this puzzle when I was 14. I had no idea how I was going to go about squeezing thirteen symmetrical theme entries in a particular order into a 15 x 15 grid — I wasn't even sure I'd be able to come up with a set of theme entries that would work at all! Anyway, the big breakthrough happened when I discovered JOHN Q for the J to Q arrangement. Unfortunately, I then had to find an entry that fit the D???W letter pattern. The only two entries I could find were DO NOW (either a contrived phrase or an awkward partial) and DEPEW (as in Chauncey Depew, a turn-of-the-century politician). I decided that DO NOW was the lesser of two evils and proceeded to the grid. I soon discovered that CHATTERBOX and KARATE CHOP were the same length, which allowed me to open up the grid a bit more, though I was still dissatisfied with the puzzle, since all the other theme entries were very short and the grid had 82 words.

Fast forward a few months to April 2012, after my 15th birthday. I was playing around with this idea some more and, after a substantial amount of grid wrangling, produced an 80-worder that replaced GET AT with GARMENT DISTRICT (a 15-letter entry). The fill had a few compromises and irksome "duplicates" in the down entries like GOES SOFT, though I was still very happy with how it turned out. After I submitted the puzzle, I noticed that I had absentmindedly clued GARMENT DISTRICT as "Big Apple district with many labels"; "Part of Manhattan's Midtown West" works much better. I also worked on a Z TO A puzzle to complement this one for a little while, though I couldn't come up with a satisfactory Q*J entry (the best I could think of was QZXJ ["Highest scoring Scrabble tiles"], which I felt would permanently mangle Amy Reynaldo's Scowl-o-Meter!).

In all, this puzzle was a lot of fun to construct, and I hope it makes for a fun solve as well!

Very neat concept today, not sure if I would have ever thought it up: thirteen words in a progression, starting with A, B, C... and ending in Z, Y, X, ... (the appropriate letters are highlighted in the answer grid below). Sort of a dual alphabetic progression, the starting letters going forward, the ending letters going backward.

A perfect start to it, A TO Z being the ideal revealer at 1-across. Often times, revealers at 1-across can come across as deflationary, sort of giving away the puzzle even before the solver starts. So I like the way David/Will presented the puzzle. It's not ideal having to read a note even before you begin solving, but I think it was a reasonable solution.

Extremely tough from a construction standpoint. Not only must you incorporate 13 theme answers, but they all have to follow a particular alphabetic constraint. It did feel a little odd that so many starred clues were for short answers, but it would be near impossible to have your themers be the longest answers in a feat like today's.

As with all audacious constructions, signs of stress pop up in the grid. Once you lock in the (slightly made-up feeling) EX-GOV, FONDU, and ICIER, there's the MTGE, GENL, SLUE pile-up in the middle. Not ideal from a smoothness standpoint, but almost necessary given the high constraints.

Another shoot-for-the-moon decision was to use GARMENT DISTRICT instead of another short answer such as GET IT? or GLOAT or even GET. I have a feeling that would have smoothed things out in the west and east (where HIKES and FONDU overlap GARMENT DISTRICT) but it is pretty impressive to have that grid-spanner as a theme entry. Same goes with CHATTERBOX (the more boring CAR WAX, CONVEX, etc. could have eliminated the old-timey ONERS plus ERI, ENORM, ORONO) and KARATE CHOP (KIDNAP, KISS UP, etc.).

All in all, a clever idea and a high-reaching construction with some trade-offs in solving smoothness.