Addison Snell author page

With my debut puzzles appearing in the New York Times this year, some friends asked me, "How long does it take you to make a crossword?" In my limited experience, it's a normal question with an inexact answer, like how long it takes to write a song or draw a picture. Some I might work on for a long time, some almost write themselves, and the amount of time spent doesn't guarantee how good the eventual result is. My recent Sunday puzzle took a long time in both conception and construction. On the other hand, today's puzzle came together quickly and easily.

One day I thought of the fact that strikeout and potassium are both abbreviated with K, despite neither starting with K. I turned it over in my mind and quickly thought of black in a printer cartridge as another example. The last one to occur to me, thousand (especially in a dollar amount), is probably the most common.

By extending BLACK out to BLACK INK, I had two nine-letter and two eight-letter entries, which is just serendipity. The theme entries aren't particularly long, so there was lots of room for flexibility in the rest of the grid. I had a working crossword in a few hours and later reworked the grid to make it livelier. Have fun, K?

I love meta-puzzles, and I was inspired by Jack Reuter's "Hidden Tactics" chess-themed puzzle on July 7, 2019. I wondered if it was possible to embed a cryptogram — a different newspaper column puzzle — into a crossword.

I succeeded through a combination of stick-to-itiveness and luck. I had the idea to use an Alan Turing quote from the beginning, along with the four theme entries that aren't part of the cryptogram. (Lofty ambitions to use additional entries like BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH (19) went away quickly once I started the grid.) The quote couldn't be too long (preventing finding a crossword-friendly encoding) or too short (not viable as a solvable cryptogram). I liked the reference to puzzles and games in this movie quote.

Finding an encoding scheme that translated to crossword entries brought me back to the pencil-and-paper days; I came up with the final cryptogram during an airplane flight while my laptop was put away. I hadn't initially imagined blocks of five — a traditional ciphertext construct — for the encoding, but that was what somehow worked. Luckily, the quote I'd chosen had exactly 40 letters.

BY SEX was the key entry I needed to get the encoding to work; the two new grid entries cross at the X. Interestingly, the final cipher has room to be different. For example, the P could be a Z or W, which would let the C be a P. Or otherwise, the L (two locations) could be an H.

I hope this puzzle encourages more creative meta-puzzles out there!