Leslie Young author page

LESLIE: This may be your first time seeing my byline, but it's not my first puzzle; I've previously published under my maiden name, Leslie Rogers.

It was a delight, as always, to collaborate with Andrea — she has such an eye for picking out which themes will be successful, and she brings so much joy to the discussion of theme entries. Self-indulgently, I would have liked to represent my household's professions with OK COMPUTER and HIS DARK MATERIALS, but hopefully, the set we landed on is more cohesive and accessible.

To my fellow constructors: I certainly do not recommend using a 4x14 set of theme answers. If you want to stick to 38 or 40 blocks and include long bonus entries, those bonuses will likely either have to (1) go in the same direction as the theme (in this case, down) and possibly cause confusion about whether they are theme answers, or (2) go in the opposite direction and cross at least three theme answers apiece, which is very constraining. Given the constraints, I'm glad to have at least squeezed two longer bonuses in. Enjoy the puzzle!

ACME: Meeting Leslie right here in San Francisco was one of the many things I love so much about the puzzle community! We had such fun working on our first CAP AND GOWN puzzle, despite our different ages and backgrounds (I didn't know DATASET, she didn't know BILLY IDOL ... OK Zoomer!), now Leslie has pointed out we are two for two! ;)

This one was all her idea, I just coached from the sidelines when I thought four 14s would be tough to tackle. I was pushing for LET'S GET PHYSICAL which was a 15 ... This puzzle was created so long ago, Ms. Olivia Newton-John was still alive and well, but that would've made for a super tribute!

We had a dozen back and forths about some of the fill (and a little clean-up in one corner at the editor's request), but overall, a surprisingly smooth ride. I'm down for science, down for a third collaboration, and just down for Ms. Rogers in general!

This puzzle started when I had the idea to use either LATE TO THE PARTY or LATE TO THE GAME as a revealer and to have the theme answers all be phrases that had been changed to be an hour late. I wrote a couple of grids based on this idea but felt like the connection between the revealer and the theme entries was too loose, so I let the grids sit until several weeks later when I suddenly had the idea to make the revealer directly related to daylight saving time.

I have Andrea Carla Michaels to thank for Darkness at Noon — I had been considering Shanghai Noon or Zero Dark Thirty for a third theme answer when I ran the idea by her, but I liked her recommendation best. The 15/15/15/13 lengths were not easy to work with — I know the fingers of blocks in the SW and SE corners aren't ideal, but they were the only way to get clean enough fill.

I had thought this theme would run on a Tuesday or Wednesday, so the editorial team toughened up some of my clues (for instance, I'm assuming my straightforward clues for NANCY and SHERYL were too easy). However, they kept close to half of my original clues, including the dual [Noise from a fan] clues and the reference to Safari for IOS.

I've always liked puzzles where numbers in phrases are changed (a division one and one around extras come to mind), so it was fun to create my own take on the genre. Hope you enjoyed the solve!

I'm very excited to have my first solo byline and my first themeless puzzle published! I decided to give themeless constructing a try after seeing the statistics about how few women have historically constructed Fridays and Saturdays for the NYT.

To start, I seeded this puzzle with POLAR BEAR PLUNGE because I love jumping in freezing cold alpine lakes. From there, I focused on converting as many of the long slots as possible into interesting entries and minimizing liabilities (including keeping the 3-letter-word count down.) I found that this grid offered a fair amount of flexibility since the entries in the middle diagonal (along the VEAL -> VERY axis) had several alternatives and could be swapped out pretty easily when I needed to rewrite a corner.

Since I'm still new to constructing, I wasn't surprised to see many clues changed in the editing process, but a few of my original ones (FIRST STEP, SKI SEASON, SARA, SPA, etc) made it through. SKI SEASON feels especially timely as the season is starting up right now (even though I prefer cross country skiing to going on downhill runs!)

Thank you to Robyn Weintraub and Peter Wentz for generously answering my many, many questions about how exactly one goes from a blank grid to a finished themeless puzzle. They shared useful technical tips and, most importantly, helped me keep my standards high. Thank you also to Erik and Will N for connecting to me Robyn and Peter, to Jeff and Jim for all the great resources at XWord Info, and to my mom and aunt for being my trusty test solvers!

ACME: Leslie Rogers was looking for a mentor and had forwarded many good ideas, and this one stood out to me.

We had a natural reveal in CAP AND GOWN, so it was a matter of hashing out details (e.g., caps should consistently come first. We needed matching 10s, etc.)

There are both metaphoric types of caps as well as physical ones (i.e., baseball vs. ice cap or hard cap) but there are only a few types of gowns, almost entirely physical (hospital, wedding.)

Leslie is a software engineer, so after we came up with initial lists, she made a program that generated every conceivable combination. New way of working for me!

Big age gap, but she learned who BILLY IDOL is, and I learned what a DATASET is. Fun and easy collaboration facilitated by the fact that we "met" online through the blogosphere but both live in San Francisco.

Happy to have played a part in her debut.

Leslie Rogers: It's a dream come true to make my debut as a New York Times crossword constructor! My mom introduced me to crosswords when I was young, and my obsession has grown in the last couple of years as I've discovered the NYT app, tournaments, and blogs. I'm a software engineer from Silicon Valley, and besides crossword puzzles, my hobbies include backpacking, scavenger hunts, trivia nights, board games, and cross country skiing with my team Aloha Nordic.

I originally met Andrea online when she posted a message that she was open to mentoring and I took her up on her offer. Coincidentally, it turned out that we live right by each other, which made collaboration easier! I sent her several theme ideas, and she picked CAP AND GOWN as having the most potential. We brainstormed dozens of caps and gown and I wrote a short script to print out all the combinations and filter them by entry length to help us choose. NIGHT-NIGHT came quickly, WHITE WEDDING was next after Andrea convinced me that Billy Idol is crossworthy, and after another round of brainstorming we finally came up with MUSHROOM BALL to round out the set. I hope you enjoy the solve!