New York Times, Wednesday, August 1, 2018

SANDE: Today's puzzle came to pass after lengthy back-and-forths between Jeff and me about the appeal (or lack thereof) of themes where you drop the same letter from real phrases to create funny theme words (letter-drops). When we started on the letter "E," we felt a lack of challenge and newness. So rather than drop "E," the 2^nd vowel of the alphabet, we chose to exclude the 3^rd vowel of the alphabet. That was perfect because we found a revealer that was spelled from only "legal" letters — EYELESS. And to up the ante, we opted to exclude the same vowel not only from the theme words—but from the whole puzzle!

Well, here's what happens when you do that: you search through the enormous heap of words from your word.lst and delete all words that have the verboten letter, so only "legal" words make up your word.lst. Guess what? Much to my shock, the word catalog shrunk more than 50 percent! There were no longer 232,051 words to choose (from Jeff's magnum word.lst). There were only 110,452. (Gulp!!) After the puzzle was complete, we reasoned, "What the hell! Why not exclude the verboten vowel from the clues as well?" Took me aback; what a challenge that turned out to be too.

Can't say enough about Jeff. How lucky for me to have found such a collaborator.

Fun to work with Sande on this one! When I collaborate with a newer constructor, I often end up doing the lion's share of the grid layout and filling, but not this time. I constructed the skeleton, but it was Sande hacking away at the grid, showing me versions that numbered into the dozens. Most of my efforts were just in pointing out problematic spots and giving suggestions on some piece of long fill that might work better than others.

I love seeing that kind of work ethic — many other constructors throw up their hands at my overly critical eye toward grid design, but Sande fully embraced it.

There's a good amount of theme material, what with the 9 — 14 — 7 — 14 — 9 lengths, but it's usually not that hard to work with. The middle 7 is especially friendly, compared to a middle 9, 11, 13, or 15. So typically, I'd be loath to finish a grid like this without at least four snazzy long bonus entries. But the no-I constraint turned out to be tougher than I first thought.

Well, it would have been easy to work in even six pieces of long bonus fill, if we had been okay with accepting globfuls of ELL, RUR kind of stuff. But I had imagined this would run on a Tuesday, so I pushed Sande to keep that glue count down to a bare minimum. I thought he did well in that regard.

Always the trade-offs, though. Maybe we could have made the long slots sing a little better? I like BYE WEEKS a lot, and ELOQUENT is pretty good. But I sure would have liked to get something more out of EQUALLY and SEAWEED (we ended up having to put in cheater squares to facilitate better fill, so these turned into seven-letter entries, which tend to be harder to convert into colorful stuff).

Turns out there are a lot of words and phrases that use the letter I! No wonder it turned out to be so difficult to fill with color and cleanliness. Learn something new with every puzzle.