New York Times, Friday, August 21, 2015

See? I told you the other puzzles I have in the queue are more challenging than the Monday that ran earlier this month!

Anyway, I constructed this puzzle last March, when I was experimenting with stagger-stacked grid patterns involving 9-letter entries. When I build stunt themelesses of this variety, I limit myself to just one seed entry, which I place at the bottom of the stack. I decided on JUST RELAX since it struck me as fun and lively, hadn't been used much (just three other times, and not since 2009), and contained easy letters toward the middle of the stack (T, R, E, L, and A). Also, the J in JUST RELAX was convenient in that it was Scrabbly yet off to the side (thus not restricting my options much), though the X in a prime position made the entry a bit of a gamble.

That said, there were still too many options, so I decided to take even more of a risk in insisting that the second-to-bottom entry in the stack had to start with a Q. Much to my delight, a stack without any major compromises fell into place, though the grid still struck me as a bit closed off — at the time, I had an extra pair of black squares above CIDER and below BRONX. Since CIDER and BRONX struck me as especially expandable, I opened up the grid and plunked down APPLE CIDER and BRONX CHEER.

My next task was to determine what the two grid-spanners would be. PERSONAL SHOPPER was an easy choice, since it both fit the best and seemed especially fun! And although LINCOLN MEMORIAL struck me as kind of neutral, I appreciated that it was solid, allowed me to use LOUDSPEAKER, and didn't necessitate any irksome short entries. After sifting through numerous options for the rest of the fill, I settled on what you currently see.

I wasn't thrilled with SLUE, EDY, or SOC, but was quite pleased with how everything else turned out, so I called it a good day with the fill and whipped up a set of clues. I was pleased to see that more of my clues made the cut than in some of my previous published puzzles, though my favorite part of the post-submission process has always been discovering the ingenious new cluing angles Will and Joel come up with! For instance, their "Place to lead a private life?" is much, much better than my original "Two, ten, or sixty" for BASE. My favorite clue in the puzzle, though, is one of my own: "Call girl employer?" for AVON! Maybe that's why I'm still single!

Well, with that, I hope you enjoy the puzzle.

Big chunks of wide open space are both pleasing to my eye ... and fear-inducing. A swath like the middle of today's puzzle is so visually stunning. But knowing the painful process of constructing a giant section, it fills me with worry, wondering what compromises I undoubtedly will see.

Thankfully, David pulls off a very nice fill with five good to great across entries — and two long downs crossing through them! All this with just LAINE (a bit on the outdated side?) and ANNAL (much more common in the plural). Smart to start off with the bottom of the five entries, looking for something both colorful and containing friendly ending letters.

After looking up Frankie LAINE, I decided being billed as "America's Number One Song Stylist" is pretty crossworthy. I still bet David would have preferred either someone more well known, or a regular word which could take a clever clue.

I like "clue echoes," when a single clue is used for two different entries … but only if the clue is used with two completely different meanings. I love when people are able to make those crazy connections. ORCA and PIRATE sharing a clue (ROUE and RAKE too) isn't that satisfying to me; simply synonyms.

Neat to see how David's body of themeless work has progressed over the years. Earlier on, some of his creations felt closed off, segmented into three or more chunks, so it's great to hear that he put a lot of effort into opening up this grid. It's hard enough to run strong entries through a big stack like this middle one, and to do it with APPLE CIDER and BRONX CHEER is pretty spectacular.