Andrew Ries author page

ANDREW: I first worked with Caitlin when I commissioned a puzzle from her for Aries Freestyle, which is a themeless puzzle-by-email subscription service that I run. I quickly found that we share much of the same constructing philosophy when it comes to themelesses - prioritizing clean grids with difficulty emerging primarily from tricky, misdirecting clues. So I couldn't wait to co-construct with Caitlin, and this puzzle is the first of our collaborative themeless efforts.

Most of this grid is Caitlin's, whose stellar ABOUT THE AUTHOR clue/entry pairing was the killer seed. I was able to open up the center with an ELIZABETH entry in the central down slot — I originally had TAYLOR and Caitlin found a good fill with the more-current WARREN. It was a great pleasure working with Caitlin and hope that solvers will see more from this byline in the future!

CAITLIN: An admirer of Andrew's puzzles (especially his themelesses), I jumped at the chance to make one with him! Collaborating with him is easy as we do indeed share a similar style. We went back and forth on this one with gridding and then split the clues for the most part. I particularly liked his clever ones for 13- and 28-Down. Always glad to collaborate with Andrew, and I'm excited to finally get a Saturday under my belt!

This puzzle is a reworking of a 15x15 I wrote a couple of years ago for a now-defunct crossword service called Aries Xword. That puzzle used BUNT as the extra letters that needed to be removed to reveal the baseball team. While I liked the idea, BUNT only works from a baseball standpoint and not so much from a wordplay standpoint. SACRIFICE works much better as the bonus word, as this can explain the wordplay mechanism as well as tie into the baseball theme.

This was a challenging grid to pull off, as it's tough working with nine theme entries that need to be in top-to-bottom order. Getting SACRIFICE to cut through two of the themers was an unplanned bonus. I tried to space out the themers as much as possible so that the crossing down entries wouldn't intersect more than two themers. SPY STORY is the only entry that crosses three themers, and all told I like the grid that emerged considering the constraints of the theme.

I know that not everyone is a baseball fan, but this is one of those "stealth" sports themes — you don't need any specific knowledge of baseball to solve the puzzle as the teams are hidden within common phrases. I hope this is an enjoyable challenge for baseball fans and wordplay fans alike!

I've become a massive fan of TANGERINE DREAM in the last couple of years. Shout out to the terrific ‘80s All Over podcast, whose review of Thief introduced me to the band, and particularly their movie soundtracks. I've seen about a dozen of the movies that they scored since writing this puzzle in July 2017. I'd say Thief is their best overall soundtrack, while Sorcerer is the best movie that they scored. Because most of their music is instrumental, I find it makes for an excellent accompaniment when filling a grid, as lyrics tend to distract me. Many a puzzle over the last few years has been written while listening to TD.

That said, I was more interested in the convenient letters of TANGERINE DREAM when I seeded the puzzle. I'd tried and failed at my first few attempts at executing this 14-10-10-14 quad-stagger layout, but this one turned out well. I was just trying for DELI at that central across; when I realized it could be expanded to PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC (which then opened up the slots for AMEN CORNER and PRINTER INK), I knew I had something. If I were constructing this today, I'd work on cleaning up the corners — there are a few too many abbreviations and initialisms for my current taste. But that center section is one of my favorites, and even more so because Tangerine Dream has become so personally beloved since writing the puzzle.

7-Down was the first entry in this grid, and then I built the central stack of 11s around the long crosser. This is a common approach I have when writing these stagger-stack freestyles. Other than the central stack, I don't work with a pre-set grid design; the grid will gradually build around the stack based on what I can do with the crossings. This organic approach to grid design is one of the more compelling aspects of writing freestyles from the center outward. Here the unplanned bonuses are the two additional long downs that flank TEACHABLE MOMENT.

There are drawbacks of working the grid design as you go, however, and this grid is a good example. The corners here are too dry, especially that southeast corner. The main reason for this is the glut of 3-letter words. In general, I don't think sixteen 3s is "too many" for a freestyle, but it can become tedious for the solver when every corner of the grid is so heavily reliant on 3s. What's more, bland entries like IMITATING and TSARINAS take up such valuable grid real estate, and don't add any sparkle to offset the surplus of short stuff.

If I were writing this puzzle today, I'd like to see if upping the word count to 70 would improve this situation. Specifically, I'd like to see if adding a block at the P of ICEPALACE (and its symmetrical partner) would make for a better overall fill, or at least allow for a grid design that opens up the corners a bit. It's possible that I tried these things and hit a dead end — I counted over 90 .puz files I've written since I wrote this last year, so apologies for my fuzzy memories of this one.

It's frustrating to revisit old work that doesn't quite meet your current standards, as is the case here. I do hope, however, that there is enough here for solvers to enjoy, and thanks as always to the editing team for making the clues better.

Grateful acknowledgment to my good friend Victor Barocas, as this puzzle was based on a puzzle that Victor wrote for the Minnesota Crossword Tournament. I originally wrote a version of this that had all Ivy League schools doing the turning. Will thought using only Ivy League schools was "myopic," so I came up with the version you see today, using a variance of well-known universities from around the country.

I think I like my original grid a little better — some flash with I WARNED YOU next to SAKE BOMBS, etc., but I think that this final version is more Tuesday-friendly*, plus I like the bonus of NOTRE DAME "bending" in the south part of the grid, considering Notre Dame's South Bend, Indiana location.

*Which was the whole point of this puzzle, to run it on a Tuesday. According to my research, no one in the Shortz Era has "hit for the cycle" in their first seven Times puzzles, and once my Friday puzzle ran in January, I set my sights on completing the "natural cycle" with a Tuesday. I have to say, it's tough to come up with a Tuesday puzzle! You have to keep the theme mechanism accessible but you're also afforded a little more challenge than a Monday puzzle traditionally offers.

Anyway, I'm happy with the results and thrilled to complete the cycle!

Someone mentioned to me a couple years ago that they once had a dentist named Dr. Hurt. That was the inspiration for the theme, but it was a little tough to come up with enough answers for a Sunday. I wanted the last names to not be homophones (no LINDA TRIPP being a bad dancer, e.g.), and the toughest part was getting symmetrical partners for everyone.

I submitted the puzzle with GLORIA ALLRED as a bad tanning-salon owner; I think I like that better than the current clue. Either way, seeing as Ms. Allred is probably the least well-known member of the bunch, it's probably the weakest theme answer. I noticed the RED dupe with RED SEA far too late for it to be excised from the grid; apologies for the inelegance.

For the STEVIE NICKS clue, I gave the option of using mohel or barber. I preferred mohel for the humor (which is why I put it at the end, a page out of the Merl Reagle textbook). Honestly I thought that the safer barber choice would be used, so I'm pleasantly surprised that mohel "made the cut" (pun intended).

If you want to solve more of my puzzles, you're in luck. I currently run two email-delivery puzzle subscription services. I write a weekly standard crossword with varying difficulty at www.ariesxword.com and a bi-weekly Rows Garden variety crossword at www.ariespuzzles.com. There are some freebies on each site too; check them out!