Kathy Matheson author page
1 puzzle by Kathy Matheson
with Jeff Chen comments
See the 11 answer words debuted by Kathy Matheson.
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Okay, so this one was backbreaking. I was really glad to have Kathy as a collaborator speaking her mind, as I was ready to make pretty big compromises at many points during the construction process. Coming up with the various individual elements wasn't that hard — we both really liked MIND CANDY hiding the GRAND CANYON, and OLD FAITHFUL going up through YELLOWSTONE, etc. — but putting all the pieces together in a 140-word grid made for a rough go. It was even tougher when we decided to locate all the parks roughly where they are on a US MAP.
Okay, ARCHES is a little off. Ahem. We had ACADIA there for a while, but we decided having both ACADIA and DENALI was duplicative. (Plus, ACADIA isn't actually the name of the mountain.)
Some of the odd stuff I tried to pass off as acceptable, before Kathy reined me in:
- Stretching the definition of "proper geographical location." California is kind of in the southeast of the US, isn't it?
- Spelling HALF DOME wrong. Ish.
- Relying on many an obscure city (NDOLA would have been so useful) to hold major grid chunks together
- Making DENALI so cockeyed / spelled wrong it looked half-mountain, half-desert
- Generally pulling crossword glue shenanigans, of the capital-Ug-ugly variety
I really enjoyed working with Kathy on this. My threshold of what's an acceptable trade-off tends to dip after I get 50 or more grid skeletons in, so it was great to have her kindly telling me at many a point that what I proposed as reasonable trade-offs were actually (cough cough) not.
I admit it, sometimes on these really complicated projects, I stick my head in the sand and go into Denali. Er, denial.
P.S. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" — our alternate title for the puzzle — is one of my favorite books ever. (Buy it here.)