New York Times, Friday, August 29, 2014

I'm very excited to have my first themeless puzzle published. My first daily puzzle was a Monday, and I've gone in order up through Friday now. Here's hoping Saturday and Sunday will happen too!

I started this puzzle by first coming up with strong, new seed entries for the first and last across answers: CROWDSOURCE and REST ASSURED. The latter entry had the added benefit of having great letters for a bottom spot in the grid. Then I spent time going through different fill options until I found strong entries for the other four long across spots.

I had CHECHNYA as another seed entry due to its being in the news. It also hadn't appeared in the puzzle before, until Ian and Katie Livengood used it 11 days ago! Oh well. :)

I focused on trying to find solid fill throughout the puzzle as well as several new entries. I hope people enjoy the result!

While I don't place any arbitrary limit on the number of proper names in a puzzle — it all depends on how familiar they are, how they cross, and how they're clued — the high number of names in this puzzle definitely pushes the limit. A particular concern here was the combination of LEBEAU, EMLEN, and NEVIS in the upper-right. If you don't know these names, two of which are sports-related, you could be in trouble. This is the reason for the extra help in the clue for 21A.

Congrats to Dani for his first themeless! He follows a tried and true path, essentially creating four triple-stacks (one in each corner) and seeding them with new phrases.

What makes for a good seed entry? A snappy phrase in itself is great, but I think something that lends itself to a clever clue makes it even better. CROWD SOURCE is a nice 1-Across, a strong way to start the puzzle. But the clue is straightforward, because it kind of needs to be — if the solver doesn't know the term already, any sort of wordplay will be lost on him/her. Introducing new entries into the crossword lexicon is a tricky business.

REST ASSURED is another great phrase — hard to believe it hasn't been used before. Not only is it snazzy, but it's so commonly heard that a clever clue could have been employed. A missed opportunity there, as ["Don't worry ..."] is a pretty easy clue. But then again, it is Friday, not Saturday, and I'm all for making some themeless puzzles more accessible to newcomers.

So tricky to knit an entire themeless together without glue. It's often near impossible to get by without any at all, so I think a good approach is to draw from different types of glue to help fool the solver into glossing over the crunchy bits. If there's a partial here, a random Roman numeral there, a plural name in a corner, so be it. It's so much easier to notice when a majority of it comes from one arena.

In today's case, Dani does a nice job with the fill, but there's so much concentrated in esoteric names that it sticks out: LEBEAU, EMLEN, RERI, NEVIS, LIAT. As Will mentioned, LEBEAU crossing EMLEN will be rough on some solvers, especially because I can see people putting in LA BEAU / EMLAN. I vaguely know Dick LEBEAU but even as a rabid football fan growing up in the golden age of Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, it didn't come easily to me.

The NW and SE stacks are quite nice; always a plus to get three strong entries atop each other. Each one being a multiple-word entry is a real bonus.