New York Times, Thursday, February 25, 2021

I've been designing puzzles for as long as I can remember, from mazes in elementary school to "crosswords" on my Scrabble board in middle school. Finding out that the Times considers submissions from everyday people was a "Wow!" moment. Having a crossword published? Incredible!

I'm a middle school science teacher. When I'm not at school, you'll likely find me cooking, watching quiz shows, or playing and creating quizzes on Sporcle.

This theme started with the revealer and then 3-Down and 36-Down. I designed the grid by hand. When I mailed it in, I was so proud! Since then, I've collaborated with great mentors and learned about many crossword resources. I've come to realize there are many do's and don'ts that I didn't know. Looking back at this grid, there are things I'd do differently:

1. Tighten up the theme. Always have the gimmick span over two words? Have the shaded letters spell out words or even a hidden message? I was happy just to find symmetrical theme answers.

2. Restructure the grid for better flow and more long answers. The isolated northeast/southwest corners just happened. Plus, there are only two long answers outside the theme, and they aren't terribly colorful.

3. Clean up the fill! I was content to find words that could fit in the grid rather than words I was excited to include.

While I'd do things differently today, I appreciate that this puzzle exists as-is, both for you to enjoy and for me to have as a reminder of what my early constructing efforts were like. I look forward to continuing to refine my skills.

Debut! Not a new idea, having had a quad repeat a few months ago and something nearly identical a few years back, but there are some fun finds in here. I especially like the ones that go over a space break, like HAN(GIN)(G IN)DENT and CO(VER) (VER)SION. DOUBLE DOWN ties everything together so aptly, giving a reason for 1) the repeated strings and 2) why the themers run down, not across.

For themes that have been done so often, I enjoy when a constructor tries to do something a little different or add a constraint. For instance, when John Farmer did this theme type, he limited himself to only triplets at the end of the first word / beginning of the second.

Six themers is an audacious way to debut. Placing them in every other column can cause so much trouble, especially in the middle of the grid. Because there are so many themers congregating in the center, you have to spend a ton of black squares right away to separate them. Impressive how smooth that region turned out, Dylan taking care to make sure the letter combinations were all friendly.

Going outward, there were some problems, not uncommon when you've already deployed so many of your precious black squares. You tend to end up with subsections bigger than you'd like, needing bits of ALERO ONERS REWON OGEES OSS to hold things together.

I got stuck in the NE corner, unfortunately, sectioned off from the rest of the grid (another artifact of the every-other-column layout). The cluing was so difficult for JUKE, UVA, and ambiguous for GAGS KEG (I tried BAR and PUB) that it felt nearly impossible.

Amusing TONTO clue — how have I not known all these years that it's Spanish for "stupid"? — although I wonder if Jay Silverheels would laugh. And fantastic clue for BUNGEE, playing on "jumper cable"!

I like it when a new constructor strives to do something different (and I love it when a new constructor expresses humility!). In this case, I would have liked some new layer — maybe pairing repeated triplets, with HAN(GIN)(GIN)G INDENT and BRIN(GIN)(G IN) NEW BLOOD to make that GIN a double? — more than the sheer quantity of themers.

A simple RegEx will find plenty of DOUBLE DOWNs, but here's a more restricted search that looks at internal duplications, i.e., ones ignoring the first two and last two letters.