Aimee Lucido author page

One of the many things I love about making crosswords is how a single puzzle becomes a fingerprint of who you are while you are making it. The words you choose to put into a grid say something about your interests, your obsessions, your values. For example, I think this puzzle makes it pretty clear that I'm interested in food, since TONKATSU and BOXED WINE are both given prime real estate in the grid. Similarly, this puzzle highlights my juvenile sense of humor, since both BRAIN FART and NAKED LIE are some of the first and last words you see while solving.

And, as you may know if you solve a lot of my puzzles, I absolutely love books. BODICE RIPPERS, yes, but also, mainly, children's books. I always try to sneak references to children's books into my clues (see 45-down) and this is, in large part, because children's books are my profession.

The juxtaposition of these many facets of a constructor's personality is always fascinating to me as a constructor, but it's especially intriguing to me as a writer. I've always enjoyed playing with the definition of poetry in my books, and the unique poetry of a crossword puzzle is something I've been trying to write about for years.

Today I'm thrilled to share the news that my third book, Words Apart, will be coming out in winter of 2024. This book combines poetry, comics, word definitions, and, yes, fully-solvable crossword puzzles. It's the story of two sisters, Olive and Mattie, and their sometimes tumultuous relationship, as they realize that life doesn't always have a right answer, spelled out perfectly inside of neat black-and-white boxes.

I hope you enjoyed this puzzle as much as I enjoyed making it and I look forward to sharing Words Apart with you!

AIMEE: Ella and I first wanted to make this a Thursday puzzle, and we tried really hard to get this to fit in a 15x. But the themers were so constrained, and it's so hard to do a puzzle where themers cross each other, that we ended up needing to go big with a Sunday-sized puzzle to make it work. Which ended up being good because this is my first Sunday-sized NYT puzzle!

ELLA: Aimee and I both really loved Andrew Kingsley's 2020 RED CROSS puzzle and were intrigued by the idea of doing a similar type of transformation. We landed on this revealer because we thought the phrase itself was super fun and liked the theme answers it allowed for (I was especially excited to include 85-Across, which is one of my favorite shows of all time).

Initially, we also wanted to include an answer where the "real" answer and the gridded answer both had zero because we both thought that was a fun, weird edge case, but alas, there didn't end up being enough space in the grid.

ELLA: Aimee and I have been real-life friends for years and, as an avid crossword solver, I always thought she was the coolest person ever because she made puzzles (among many other reasons!).

In quarantine, I finally took her up on her offer to teach me. Within a week of riffing, we'd made our first puzzle together. Since then, we've made 6 (?) more, three of which have run in AVCX.

Puzzling together online has been such a fun way to hang out even though we can't see each other in person. I love collaborating with Aimee because we push each other to keep playing around with grids and ideas until they finally click in a way we both love. We've also got extremely similar taste and crossword quirks.

This puzzle was a total collaboration where I have no idea whose idea any part of it was — we both loved the revealer from the beginning but wanted to figure out the most fun way to spin it, and landed on this one. There is also a version of this puzzle on our computers with totally different themers because neither of us noticed we'd forgotten to include the revealer until we were about to clue. Oops.

When I'm not puzzling, I'm an actress — mostly theater and mostly in NYC and the Bay Area!

AIMEE: Ella and I have been real-life friends for several years now, when she moved to The Bay Area from New York. But between the pandemic and her moving back to New York in early 2020, we haven't seen each other in person in a while. But the funny thing is that, now that she lives across the country from me, she's actually the person I "see" the most these days.

And that's thanks almost entirely to crossword puzzles.

I had never really collaborated much on crosswords before this year, but something about the pandemic has made me crave the collaboration process. Plus, the puzzles Ella and I come up with always seem to be better than what either of us is capable of making on our own. Or at least, I know she makes me a better constructor. I mean, she was the one who realized we hadn't included the reveal in this puzzle's first draft! If it had just been me, I probably would have sent this off without its key ingredient!

Here's to many more, Ella!

The original accepted version of this puzzle actually had a totally different bottom right-hand corner. It had the phrase ELDERWAND as one of the long answers, which, at the time of acceptance, I thought, was a really great entry. It'd be a fun gimme for Harry Potter fans, but it could also be clued in such a way that makes it inferrable even for those who aren't. But, since JK Rowling has been in the news lately for reasons that make me want to NOT put her in a crossword puzzle, I was left with a dilemma: do Harry Potter entries lose their lustre because of something the author did? And if the answer is yes, does, does that mean we should revise a previously-accepted puzzle to accommodate a change in public sentiment?

I honestly don't know the answer to these questions, but what I did know was that that corner had lost its lustre for me. So I figured if I could come up with a new corner that I liked just as much, it would be worth changing. And if not, well, everyone understands that there's a delay between acceptance and publication of puzzle, right? Luckily, I found this new bottom-right corner that I like just as much, if not more, than the previous one. I hope you do too!