New York Times, Wednesday, August 28, 2019

This is my first crossword in the New York Times, and I'm excited to check this achievement off of the personal bucket list! I've been doing Times crosswords for most of my life, but only got into constructing last year. While I was completing a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies, crosswords proved to be an especially refreshing break from reading hundreds of pages of theory. There's something so satisfying about landing on a promising theme, figuring out a grid formation that works, and cracking a stubborn corner of fill. Plus, I finally found a niche where people might appreciate my insatiable appetite for punning.

As I soon discovered, many skills go into constructing a crossword, and all of them have a learning curve. Finding out about tools like Crossfire and XWord Info made a substantial difference. I also read through years of constructor's notes and Jeff Chen's commentary and learned a lot from them. Even still, I submitted twelve unsuccessful crosswords before suddenly, one day en route to the gym, the words Love Actually popped into my head. Then You Got Served. Then The Fault in Our Stars and The Net and tennis. All five theme answers just appeared like a cartoon light bulb. I held my breath as I counted the letters in the entries and hoped they would work. Once those stars aligned, the rest of the puzzle quickly fell into place. I guess it goes to show you that high school tennis lessons and a doctorate in film can have some unintended benefits.

Now, the next goal on my bucket list to get a Puzzle of the Week accolade from Jeff one of these days!

I enjoyed the modern feel that (The) FAULT IN OUR STARS gave this debut puzzle. Fantastic book, showing that Young Adult novels can be literature, not Twihard trash.

Okay, fine. #TeamJacob.

I also enjoyed the image of Hugh Grant being asked, "Pardon me, old chap, could you pray tell me the score of the match, pip pip?"

TENNIS in movies? I've seen so many plays on tennis — some that are aces — that it takes a lot for another one to make me feel like I'm at center court. I might be missing something that pulls this theme together and makes it an amazing overhead smash. I like the consistency. But what connects tennis to movies?

YOU GOT SERVED didn't work as well as the others. Yes, SERVED is a word in tennis, but who ever GOT SERVED? It'd take one hell of an ace to elicit that yell from a Wimbledon crowd. In your face, Hugh Grant!

Using just three long themers should open up a grid for a ton of bonus entries, and Daniel did well to incorporate the goodies of ACOUSTICS and LUSITANIA, not to mention CASTRATI and RISOTTOS, which run through them.

Perhaps I shouldn't use CASTRATI and "run through" in the same sentence.

A three-long-themer puzzle ought to be perfectly clean, too. Today's does have the TENNIS revealer, which is hard to work around — note SST / SATORI — but it could have been cleaned up. There's too much ENE ORO RIT SEL SYN, along with a dupe of YEA / YES.

I understand Daniel's desire to pack the puzzle chock full of bonuses in case solvers didn't connect with the theme. Overpacking leads to bulges and broken luggage, though. Rearranging the grid skeleton so all his long bonuses were in the down direction would have helped to achieve a better balance overall.