I constructed this puzzle the summer before junior year, which was less than two years ago but feels like the very distant past. Heck, even yesterday feels like the very distant past when you're a second-semester senior! Speaking of which, Will chose one of my puzzles for a date that's very important to us second-semester seniors: college committal day. Luckily for me, I made my decision a couple weeks ago: I'm going to skip college and become a full-time crossword constructor in my parents' basement . . . not!
I'm very excited to announce that I'll be attending Stanford University this fall as a prospective Computer Science + X major! CS + X is a cross-curricular Stanford program that allows you to major in computer science and an additional field of your choosing, such as linguistics. I plan to continue with crosswords in college, though I also very much look forward to exploring the thousands of new opportunities college has to offer!
Anyway, back to the puzzle. Having solved many crosswords with triple-stacked, quad-stacked, and even quint-stacked 15's, I decided I wanted to try something different. Inspired by Derek Bowman's puzzle with a single triple-stack of 16's, I set out to construct a puzzle with two triple-stacks of 16's. Armed with a smallish list of 16-letter entries and a largish amount of youthful spirit, I was able to come up with two 16-stacks that struck me as particularly lively. I remember discarding numerous other options in which one of the 16's seemed less in-the-language than the others or where there were simply too many ugly short crossings. Even in the final version, I wasn't thrilled with having to use SITU, MNEM, etc., but I felt that the strengths of the stacks outweighed the weaknesses.
I then moved on to the center "connecting" section, which was a challenge because it had to be very open in order to keep the word count below (or at least reasonably close to) Will's limit of 72. I knocked out a pair of black squares in the original pattern, allowing me to use HOT SPRING and the full name JESUS ALOU instead of just HOTS and ALOU. By an amazing stroke of luck, the other long entries that fell into place (LEMON MERINGUE PIE, FEROCIOUS, and ANGEL DUST) ended up being the exact sort I strive to include in nonstunt themelesses!
The short fill turned out quite smoothly, too, with one notable exception: JOTTER. I remember agonizing over JOTTER for the longest time and exploring numerous alternate fills, but the JOTTER fill came out on top every time. So JOTTER it was.
I had a lot of fun with the clues and was pleased to see that many of my originals made the cut. My favorite clue that didn't survive was "It may have a hot bust" for KILN — guess I'll have to save that one for some future indie puzzle!
For now, I hope you enjoy my puzzle. I've since moved on to triple-stacks of 14's, one of which I'm cluing up as you read this!