New York Times, Tuesday, July 30, 2019

I'm (obviously!) very excited to be making my NYT debut. I have only been solving puzzles for about a year, and pretty quickly got interested in construction. This was my first "real" submission after working with my very helpful crossword mentors, Ross Trudeau and Amanda Chung earlier this year. (I now know that my first two submissions, last year, were embarrassingly bad!) If anyone is interested in construction, I'd highly recommend finding a mentor.

I knew I wanted to do something relating to capitals, and I originally just had capitals hidden in rather boring words (comPARISon and anticLIMActic, e.g.). Amanda suggested that I needed a revealer and a "why" to my puzzle. Then I thought of using "CAPITALIZE" as a revealer and making wacky phrases by adding a letter to the beginning of a word, making it start with a capital, like "OSLOW JAMS" and "TUNISEXUAL" but they were hard to clue, and just a little too wacky. Once I thought of START-UP CAPITAL I put this puzzle together, and I think it turned out pretty OK. If I could go back, I'd try to get rid of ORLY and OSIER, which I don't think belong in an early-week puzzle. My favorite entry is BABY BUMPS, which I was excited to sneak in, as the mom of a 1-year old.

Debut! I've had the pleasure of working on a few collabs with Christina over the past two months — we'll have a neat Sunday coming in the near future. She's a hard worker, takes feedback seriously, learns from it, and tries to think of solvers' preferences over her own. Everything you like to see out of a new constructor.

STARTUP / CAPITAL is a beautiful phrase to play upon. I was in the startup world in a previous career, and STARTUP CAPITAL was such a concern for the first six months. Then again while raising our Series B. Then yet again with Series C. It wasn't until we went public that I started to feel (a little) less worried about the entire endeavor going belly up.

My first impression was that it would have been great to incorporate longer capitals. Lo and behold, I couldn't find a single world CAPITAL that was longer than five letters that would have fit. Huh!

Not only that, but I couldn't find any other CAPITALs that would work, period. Double huh! That makes it a surprisingly tight theme.

One knock is that LOME, the capital of Togo, shouldn't be in the fill. Many solvers won't notice this inclusion, but it's a point of inelegance that distracted during my solve, making me wonder if it was somehow thematic.

(Ah, I just though of LO MEIN NOODLES.)

I appreciated the long bonuses. BABY BUMPS was especially nice — Christina mentioned that it's her desire as a constructor to incorporate fill that might delight solvers in demographics that have been historically overlooked. This is a great thing for the NYT crossword. I imagine there are tons of mothers or soon-to-be mothers that will love seeing BABY BUMPS in their puzzle.

I bet with what she's learned now, Christina would redo the SE corner. ENERO / DELA / DRED isn't great. That's all dictated by the PROTIP / P DIDDY selections. As much as I love the bonuses, the gluey bits are too high a price to pay, especially for an early-week puzzle.

Strong debut! I'd say I'm guessing we'll see more solid work from Christina in the future, but having worked in the trenches with her, I'm 100% sure of that.