Joseph Gangi author page
3 puzzles by Joseph Gangi
with Constructor comments
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| D | O | D | G | E | S | T | Y | G | O | O | S | E |
Greetings! I am an attorney, musician, and curler from Minnesota (among other things!), thrilled to be making my Times debut. I tried my hand at construction at the end of 2019 with a play on musical instruments. It was terrible. Luckily, there is a wealth of information out there to assist aspiring constructors, not to mention receiving invaluable personal feedback from the editors on those puzzles that didn't quite make the cut.
This particular puzzle was a relatively early construction. I completed it in August 2020 and it was accepted in December. I spent a lot of time self-editing this one before submitting, and looking back I am still relatively pleased with the result.
This puzzle was quite literally built around the central artwork, which I made one day without any idea how to use it. My kids saw it and thought it was "cute" (ok — I think it's pretty cute too), so I toyed around with a few different ideas, finally settling on incorporating one of my favorite childhood games into the puzzle. In the end, my own "ah ha" moment came when it dawned on me to use the clues and take the solver through the act of playing this game. Everything fell into place after that.
My original clues were simply "Duck" .. other clues .. "Duck" .. other clues .. "Duck" .. other clues .. [etc.] .. and ending with "I pick you!" The final product tightens up some of those clues to be more precise to their answers (always a good thing) and my thanks to the editors for their fantastic work, all without sacrificing the basic essence of what I was going for.
Although, I do send apologies to my fellow Minnesotans; we all know that the real answer to 67-Across should be GRAYDUCK.