Derek Bowman author page

SARAH: I have always enjoyed co-creating crosswords with Derek. (Never a cross word)

Emailing facilitates the task of back-and-forth discussions to reach agreements as to theme entries, grid design, fill, and ultimately clues. This work went through many changes in all those areas.

We initially had several words from which to choose the needed five synonymous theme entries. With BLATHER, PRATTLE, and TWADDLE all being 7 letter words, we were given the flexibility to select the one we needed to fill the NE corner. We sure needed that flexibility to find the best overall fill. The other two were ultimately used as theme clues.

Once it was decided to choose other synonyms and descriptive phrases for each of the theme entry clues, little did we know that we had created more work for ourselves. It required a great deal more site-searching until we found them. In the end, the editorial staff did some tweaking to enhance the outcome. In addition to our theme work, it took more grid work to find entries to meet the New York Times criteria.

It was a long, but well-spent, time as we hoped for and we finally received our final acceptance.

DEREK: It's been a pleasure working with Sarah over the years. As a collaborative team, we now have 3 New York Times puzzles, 3 Simon & Schuster puzzles, 1 LA Times puzzle, 1 Wall Street Journal puzzle, and 1 puzzle-oriented shoebox diorama (complete with construction paper and wagon-wheel pasta noodles). What a long, strange trip it's been!

Sarah is definitely a theme maven. If you look up "Themes" under the Wikipedia page for "Crossword," you'll see one of hers as an example. She came to me with the theme for this puzzle at the 2019 ACPT, and we spent the next 9 months hashing it out, with plenty of guidance from the great New York Times editorial team. Hope everyone enjoys it.

JEFF SLUTZKY: I'm excited to be making my New York Times crossword debut; it's my first crossword anywhere! I first came up with this theme several years ago. I knew nothing about crossword constructing software or word-lookup programs at the time, so I tried to create the whole puzzle using graph paper, my pencil, and my brain. I didn't get far.

Then last March I met Derek Bowman at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. He's a veteran constructor, and when I told him I had a theme idea, he expressed interest in collaborating with me. He came up with a couple of new theme entries, as well as the great TORAH kicker at the end. One of our original entries — MENTOR AT WORK (clued as "Yoda or Mr. Miyagi, from 9 to 5?") — was nixed by the editors because it didn't significantly change the meaning of the base phrase, so we replaced it with CAPTOR IN HAND.

Derek was great to work with, and I learned a lot from him. I'm glad we were able to put this puzzle together!

DEREK BOWMAN: Jeff Slutzky had several ideas for theme entries that involved adding TOR to common phrases, and I found them to be very funny. (IT'S RAINING, MENTOR sadly ended up on the cutting room floor.) Together, we eventually narrowed it down to the theme entries listed in the grid, with some guidance from Will Shortz and Sam Ezersky.

Jeff has a great sense of humor, and I'm still amazed that he immediately identified the tune from Dear Evan Hansen that was lovingly redone at the ACPT talent show last year after hearing just a few notes. Jeff is a whiz at musicals, has a keen eye for detail, and was a lot of fun to work with on this puzzle.

DEREK: I had submitted several versions of this puzzle to Will and Joel to the extent that they (kindly) nudged me in the direction of finding a collaborator.

I had worked with Sarah previously on a few puzzling endeavours, including a small diorama for a National Puzzlers' League convention event. It has always been very enjoyable working with her, a theme maven who doesn't let me get away with crummy entries, and again our collaboration worked out well.

I was particularly bogged down with chunky groups of black squares for the rays of the SUN, but she streamlined the layout of the whole grid and made everything fall into place.

I am indebted to her for helping make this puzzle come together. Thanks.

SARAH: This is our second New York Times collaboration. I met Derek, a successful new constructor, in 2008, at an NPL convention. We thought it would be fun to work on a puzzle together.

When collaborating, we always choose to work with wordplay themes as well as those that require unusual grids. This astrological theme was Derek's and Derek's alone. In my opinion, he is a grid master. In this venture, he combined circular THE WORLDs along with a SUNny central rebus.

We worked together on some grid manipulation to lessen the black square count as well to make the puzzle more pleasing to the eye. It was fun getting the puzzle publication-ready and is always fun working with Derek.

For this puzzle, the seed was solving the straightforward entry SOCRATES in another puzzle and seeing it as SO/CRATES and wondering if other ancient Greek names had the same property. Then I came across HIPPO/CRATES and ARI/STOP/HANES. It took me a while to find DEMOS/THE/NES, and the two bonus entries were SAP/PHO and PIN/DAR, if solvers view them that way. GREEK and PLAYS also fit in nicely to include a tie-in to the theme.

This led to the NW and SE corners being wide open, with a lot of grunt work and different submitted versions going into finding the right fill for those areas. The only NW option I saw included MOPTOPS / MOSHED / TARPED / DEE DEE. I could not find TARPED in any dictionary, so I changed it to TOP COPS / TOSHES / CARPET / SEETHE. TOSHES is a plural name, but there are at least two famous TOSHES out there, so I figured I was good with that corner. The SE corner had SO many versions until the final one.

I hope that people enjoy the result. Happy puzzling!