John D. Child author page
1 puzzle by John D. Child
with Constructor comments
See the 4 answer words debuted by John D. Child.
| E | T | C | H | T | S | A | R | B | A | S | I | N | ||
| A | I | R | S | I | N | R | E | E | V | I | T | A | ||
| S | T | A | T | U | E | O | F | L | I | B | E | R | T | Y |
| E | L | M | P | R | O | M | O | N | ||||||
| D | E | S | K | T | O | P | C | O | M | P | U | T | E | R |
| I | U | D | H | U | E | E | R | G | O | |||||
| S | T | A | R | R | S | I | T | A | R | O | R | A | ||
| C | A | B | I | N | E | T | M | I | N | I | S | T | E | R |
| A | M | A | S | C | E | N | E | V | E | S | T | S | ||
| B | I | C | S | Z | E | E | S | I | E | |||||
| S | L | I | P | P | E | R | Y | W | H | E | N | W | E | T |
| H | U | M | H | A | R | E | P | A | ||||||
| P | U | R | E | M | A | T | H | E | M | A | T | I | C | S |
| U | S | U | R | P | W | I | R | E | B | L | O | T | ||
| G | E | N | E | S | O | P | E | D | A | L | T | E |
GEORGE: John started working on this puzzle in April 2015 but got sidetracked by the earthquake in Nepal later that month. In early summer, he sent me a prototype to ask for help. I was sure that all five tastes could be incorporated into 15-letter theme answers and made a new grid. We worked through eight or nine versions of that and sent the puzzle to a few people to test solve in late summer 2015. With their feedback we reworked the grid again and iterated fill changes through another half-dozen versions to what you see today. Submitted September 2015 and accepted in December of that year.
We were pleased to find a sweet spot for the revealer, TASTE, crossing two theme answers. It's nice to see that our clues for SCENE and OUTIE are in the final version, and we especially enjoyed Will and Joel's clue for PURE MATHEMATICS. Ours was {Goldbach's conjecture, e.g.}.
JOHN: In October of 2014 I made a puzzle and asked on a crossword discussion blog for testers. I got a gratifying number of very helpful comments, including a long email from George packed with suggestions and information and including a link to xwordinfo.com. (Jeff: my subscription is George's fault: when I saw my own puzzle in the "Analyze view" I was hooked.) George has been my mentor since then, and I owe the opportunity to appear in the Times today to him and his group of crossword friends.