Joe Deeney author page

When my daughter, now almost 3, was an infant, I'd pace around our house rocking here to sleep, singing whatever popped into my mind. While singing "You Learn", I realized ALANIS MORISSETTE and JAGGED LITTLE PILL were both 16 letters long and stacked pretty well. Onto the idea list that one went where it sat for a while. Eventually I decided to look for a similar duo to build a full puzzle around –- IMDB has data files available that I was able to mine for this. I'm sure the cool kids would have used Python, but I must admit to using a combination of Excel and SQL. Other candidates that popped up, for those interested:

Quentin Tarantino / From Dusk Till Dawn
Jennifer Connelly / Requiem for a Dream
Stephanie Beatriz / Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Yvonne Strahovski / The Handmaids Tale
Michael Stuhlbarg / Call Me by Your Name
Reginald Gardiner / The Great Dictator
Maureen O'Sullivan / Tarzan and His Mate
Erich von Stroheim / La Grande Illusion

Here's hoping this puzzle is a big hit with everyone!

Though not direct inspiration, this puzzle owes a bit of a spiritual debt to Sandy Ganzell's March 23, 2017 puzzle. I'm always excited at puzzles that find a way to use the grid itself as the revealer. It can be risky to construct such a puzzle with so much solving being completed in apps and constrained by the electronic format — hopefully this one translates well.

I originally designed the grid in Excel — normal squares were 15 cells by 15 cells, while the big squares were 17 by 17, about 28% bigger in area. I centered along the middle of each "big" answer, which led to some of the down answers being a bit of a zig-zag. The editorial team's grid is much nicer. I suspect the uniqueness of this grid and deciding what to do electronically is part of why this puzzle spent 20 months in the acceptance queue before its publish date.

With four theme answers of the same length, I recall exploring all 24 permutations of the order the answers appear in this grid to see which gave the best bonus fill.

Favorite clues from the editorial team: 2-Down (how did I miss the opportunity to clue it like that myself?), 6-Down, 17-Across. Favorite of mine that survived: 13-Across.

This is the first of my puzzles to run in the New York Times since the birth of my daughter. My last NYT puzzle ran on April 3, which was also her due date, but she stubbornly waited an extra week and didn't join us until April 10. I did that day's great NYT puzzle by Byron Walden in the hospital in the wee hours of that morning, awaiting her arrival, and had quite a laugh when 18-Across [Shot in the back] turned out to be EPIDURAL. Funny how crosswords mirror real life.

I'm pretty happy with this grid, especially the 6x6 corners in the NE and SW. In hindsight, I probably created a puzzle with a Monday/Tuesday theme and Thursday/Friday fill, but I'd like to think there is room for puzzles like that occasionally. GRAYLY is a bit of a clunker, but I think most of the rest of the long fill is fun.

I can't take credit for great clue at 36-Down (an improvement over what I submitted, "Non-PC types").

I hope everyone is staying as safe and healthy as possible during this strange and difficult time.

I made this puzzle in autumn 2018, and it was accepted in early January 2019. I had the idea to use WITH OR WITHOUT YOU as a revealer without knowing exactly what that would reveal. I used Excel to develop a list of words from my list that remain valid words when removing a "U". I revisited the list several times over a month or so trying to figure out what exactly the puzzle would be until I noticed both MONTAGUE and CAPULET were on the list. That seemed a little light on theme, so I tried to build a colorful 73-word grid in case the team might want to run it on a Friday.

My original manuscript didn't include *s in the clues or revealer language in 34-Across, leaving noticing the connection as an exercise for the solver. Looks like the team thought this was too opaque — good construction learning for me.

One clue I was sorry to see go (but understand why) was for 15-Across: [One getting laid as part of a ceremony].

I had the idea for this revealer while driving home from work in November 2018. It's not the best place to get ideas as they can't be written down immediately, but thankfully I was able to hold on to this one. I built the puzzle on and off through November and December. Submitted in January 2019, accepted in May.

To make the puzzle, I created a word list that replaced all instances of "ATE" and "OO" with 8. I placed the revealer and H8RSGONNAH8 in the grid as if I were building a themeless and tried to build the puzzle from there. There was a bit of a challenge to evenly distribute eight 8's in the grid while ensuring the horizontal 8's were all replacing ATE and pronounced like 8 while ensuring the vertical eights were all replacing OO. Because I didn't have a set of theme answers in mind, the provided some freedom to try to make the fill as interesting and clean as possible.

Overall, I'm happy with the result. KEPI and OLEG aren't great entries, but they don't make me go YIPE either. This is my first Thursday puzzle in the Times and probably the tricksiest themed puzzle I've had published anywhere to date. I'm curious to read what everyone's thoughts are on it.

It's very exciting to have another puzzle published in the New York Times! This was the first themeless puzzle I had accepted for any venue; by fun coincidence, I also constructed today [4/27]'s themeless LA Times puzzle. Double puzzle day!

Two years ago or so, I tried making a few themeless puzzles when I couldn't come up with any good themes. After a couple encouraging "near miss" rejections, I decided to take a more serious and systematic approach to making a themeless puzzle. I made this puzzle fourteen months ago; I've made several themeless puzzles since then (a few of which are in the queue for future Fridays and Saturdays) and I've learned a lot in the process.

A couple of entries in this grid would not pass muster with me today. ROLF in particular, but RARED and NEMEA are entries I'd prefer to avoid as well. I'm also not sure I'd include ALL IS TRUE now, for fear it's too niche. I originally clued it as [Alternate title for Shakespeare's "Henry VIII" (honestly!)] to give a bit of a parenthetical hint to the solver.

I was pleasantly surprised to see how many of my clues were kept. I'm particular happy that the clues for GO TO PRESS and OVER SLEEP made it through. Two that aren't mine are [Dawn of the Space Age?] and [Major thing in the heavens?] - I guess I need to work on my astronomy cluing.