New York Times, Thursday, June 13, 2019

MICHAEL: Funny to be submitting a comment to Jeff Chen about this, but I had an idea for a puzzle and needed help with the grid, and everyone told me I should ask ... Jeff Chen! That was good advice. Jeff was able to design a fillable grid and we did it all through email in a few days.

Our only disagreement was over whether the words under the hidden HAND should have a surface sense of their own. I thought they should, although that greatly limited the number of choices. Jeff thought it was fine to have nonsense words in those entries, I conceded the point, and Will liked the puzzle. Okay, Jeff — you were right!

JEFF: It can be tough for any two constructors to see eye to eye on any given project. When Michael approached me with this concept, my immediate thought was that it would be interesting to see IWORK or YMEN in one's puzzle; mystifying, flipping into hopefully a solid a-ha moment.

Turns out Michael had a very different idea, wanting only regular-seeming words that simply didn't seem to work with their clues (think: LED clued as HANDLED). He felt strongly that this would produce a better a-ha moment, whereas I worried that solvers would gloss over them, potentially finishing without understanding the concept. That would be impossible with something kooky like ICAPS taunting you.

How to resolve the logjam? My secret weapon is Jim, who gives great second opinions. And if I don't like his input, I simply ignore it and tell people he said something different.

Seriously though, I hope we came to the right decision. It's always so difficult to predict what will produce the best a-ha moment possible.

Such a tough grid to construct. It's usually not THAT hard to work with stacked themers, if some of them are shorties. But we had such little flexibility — the partial word had to start directly under the H in each HAND, and we only had a few to choose from.

Besides IWORK, ICAPS, YMEN, there was only the less interesting IER, ILY, LER, EDIN. I would have loved a fourth that was more interesting, but of the less ideal candidates, EDIN seemed at least interestingly kooky — something you'd never see in another (reasonably good) crossword.

Took me a couple dozen tries to arrive at a skeleton that tested out reasonably well, and I counted myself very lucky that BADPR existed to satisfy that tough -DP- letter combination, as well as DNA LAB. What else is going to fill a DN???? pattern?

I don't like using "corner blacks" (in the very SW / NE), as they are visually unappealing to my eye (Rich Norris at the LAT likes them even less than I do). But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. With an already biggish SW corner, and the ultra-constraining DNA LAB, we could barely escape with a SABE / OCULI.

Not the most elegant corner in the world, but sometimes you have to accept compromises in the service of a theme. Hope it didn't pull down people's solving experiences.

Every puzzle's a struggle. So many aspects to balance out. Hope we arrived at the right one for you.