New York Times, Saturday, July 15, 2023

Even after a decade of constructing crosswords, I still learn from my mistakes. I learned quite a lot from making this themeless.

Given the ultra-high competition in themelesses, you must do something extraordinary to get noticed. That might be a unique grid pattern, wickedly sharp clues strewn throughout, or a dense packing of star entries that Will Shortz can't help but notice. Best to hit all three marks.

This one started well enough. Playing around with mirror symmetry and a pair of pyramid blocks for a couple of days finally resulted in something that looked both fun and not impossible to fill. The most constrained region was the bottom, with those long slots serving as an inflexible backbone.

After a week of hacking, I landed on ON THE INSIDE / AMERICAN LIT / EXPLICIT CONTENT / CASE INSENSITIVE, and it felt right. CASE INSENSITIVE had great cluing potential, playing on "capital punishment," and EXPLICIT CONTENT made me think about "sworn statements." So I filled the rest of the grid, assuming the clues would gel.

Three weeks and many sworn statements later, I still couldn't phrase my clues to my liking. The best I could do — after nearly a hundred rewrites — was this:

EXPLICIT CONTENT [Warning issued before sworn statements?]

CASE INSENSITIVE [State that forbids capital punishment?]

I figured Will and team would polish these up and call them good. Why didn't I think from the start that joking around about capital punishment would likely never fly? Or spend more time trying to word something much better around "sworn statements" that would actually seem innocently clever instead of a dead giveaway?

I #@!EXPLICIT CONTENT#$! swear, next time, I will.