Douglas Taillon author page
1 puzzle by Douglas Taillon
with Constructor comments
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| D | Y | A | D | S | A | T | F | A | C | E |
I live in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada, a bordertown to northern New York.
When I was a teenager, my friends and I went through a phase of trying to outdo each other by inserting big words at random into our conversation. To avoid embarrassment, I studied the dictionary in search of words I could impress people with and became interested in words and their origins. Around this time I started doing crossword puzzles and years later wondered how the puzzles were made (did the words go in first or the black squares...?).
I get by with a little help from my friends. I get lots of help from my friend Ray Bryant. Ray is from Oxford, England (his PhD stands for Posthole Digger) and is my go-to clue man. When someone told his wife that Ray seemed outspoken, her response was, "Not by anyone I know." Yet when I would come up with a clue having too many words, Ray would ask me, in typical British form, "How does this novel end?"
When constructing this puzzle, I thought the black squares would look nice arranged as a '2' in the centre of the grid. This added to the challenge of creating the four 'main highways' surrounding it with 2-related words (double, second, twin, two). I find the more words you put in a grid, the more it turns into cement, and becomes "as unyielding as the grave." (Song of Solomon 8:6, New World Translation 2013 Revision)
I would like to thank Will for the "second helping" suggestion for which Ray came up with a simple one-word clue, showing that less really can be more. Anyway, I'm at a "loss for words" to describe how thrilled I am to have this puzzle published.