New York Times, Friday, April 17, 2015

After a few of my themed puzzles were accepted by the NYT, I decided to try my hand at a themeless grid. Will Shortz has noted that only 1-2% of his themeless submissions are from female constructors. I want to improve on that number.

Peter Collins' grid with six spanners seemed like a good place to start. (Eventually, I needed to move a few black squares around to get clean fill.) I keep a running list of vocabulary words to enter in my crossword database. Fifteen letter entries get special note — I was glad to include ELIZABETH WARREN in the grid. I enjoyed reading her latest book and following her career in recent years. I thought HOSTESS TWINKIES was a fun entry too. SNOWDEN would also have been a debut entry for the NYT at the time of my submission but Brendan Emmett Quigley beat me out.

I'm trying to improve my cluing. My submissions for TARZAN, SNOWDEN and ELIZABETH WARREN — "A swinging guy", "A revealing guy" and "Wall Street concern" didn't make the cut. They were a little vague, even for a Friday. A clue like "Lover of Jane Porter", gives you the information you need yet can also misdirect by giving the last name which you don't usually hear and may never have known. I missed the opportunity to link SAINT and BEDE, but Will and Joel did not. I appreciate their editing expertise.

I am pleased to have my first solo themeless published in the NYT and hope you have enjoyed your solving experience.

ML's first solo themeless! Unusual layout, featuring six grid-spanners, laid out in a criss-cross style. This type of arrangement is tough to execute on cleanly, as every region around two crossing grid-spanners becomes highly constrained. And given that there are eight such intersections, which means that the entire puzzle faces tough constraints all over.

WAHOO! ML does quite well in smoothing out the short stuff holding the puzzle together. There's been some Facebook chatter about STRO, but I think it's a reasonable enough answer, especially for those fans in Houston. I imagine people not in Seattle would think I'm crazy for clueing THEMS as [Seattle's MLB team] = THE M'S, but it's super common here.

Really the only place I found tough was the south. I liked learning a tidbit about SAINT BEDE — the cross-reference works well because the answers are so close to each other — but not being familiar with BARI as an Italian port made the B a guess for me. There's an argument to be made that as an educated solver, I really ought to have known one of them. Grumble grumble, fine!

Ah, there was the KRIS KROS crisscross. KRIS felt much more like a real name of course, but END ON felt much more apt than END IN for [Finish with]. Darn my gullibility when it comes to B-list celebs!

Finally, A STROKE OF GENIUS regarding A STROKE OF GENIUS. Themelesses featuring grid-spanners rely on the long entries to be stellar, since there usually isn't much else of note besides them. Not only is A STROKE OF GENIUS fantastic in itself, but it's a devious trap. All the first letters were clued so easily that I quickly had ASTRO- as a start. So of course, [Something that's brilliant] had to be some sort of ASTRONOMICAL phenomenon, right? Just loved this trap, set up and sprung so fiendishly for a unique a-ha moment.

Hoping to see more of ML's byline on themelesses, and more diversity within themeless constructors in general. It would have never occurred to me to feature ELIZABETH WARREN or KROS — aaugh, KRIS! Kardashian — for example, so I like getting into the mind of someone who thinks very differently from me.