Mary Lou Guizzo author page

I'm glad I could help MaryLou out with her KETANJI / BROWN / JACKSON concept. When she approached me with it, she had spaced out the three pieces, which was smart for grid layout and fill, but it struck me as disjointed — solvers would struggle to connect the cross-references. Stacking the components felt much stronger, like a single marquee headline, but it sure proved a challenge.

I spent so much time trying to thread AUDIO JACK through the center column, with CARLS JR to its left, but KBJ kept banging her gavel at me. Hopefully, solvers don't struggle with the RIOJA crossings — I can barely tell a red from a white, but I've seen RIOJA enough times in stores that it's at least a familiar string of letters now.

After weaving in a couple of long bonuses like MAC N CHEESE (one of the few things my kids will eat (as long as it's a specific type of mac and an even more specific type of cheese) and STOLEN BASE, which felt ripe for clever cluing, I passed it on to ML to fill out the rest.

I'm still uncomfortable having CLEAVAGE in this tribute puzzle of sorts, but ML had a reasonable point, that the word can easily take multiple other definitions.

I'm ceding all my space today to Mary Lou, who has a lot of great material to present!

I've had the pleasure of working on dozens of puzzles with Mary Lou over the years, and knowing her preferences and tendencies helped a ton today.

Given that she asked me to help make a puzzle last year seeded with KAMALA HARRIS, all I had to read was [Voting rights activist …] before I dropped in STACEY ABRAMS.

On a similar note, I've taken to playing Wordle with a twist: I use my friends' emoji posts and knowledge of their starting words, frequently being able to deduce the word in one guess.

Ain't I a stinker?

The other headliner was tougher to uncover, but that made it incredibly satisfying. I was positive it was something like DON'T EXT___ ... is DON'T EXTEND IT a thing? Guess I should have followed the clue's advice about looking at the bigger picture! CONTEXT IS KEY is one of those stellar phrases we wish we had already added to our Word List.

Some great clues to flesh out the solving experience, too:

• As a die-hard fantasy basketball player, Mary Lou had me stymied with an athlete dunking in an ICE BATH after dunking on the court.
• I fall for "spelling" misdirects so often, but MERLIN as a "spelling expert" still makes this Dumbledore-wannabe grin.
• My daughter does not at all fancy things that are not fancy. The answer to that clue expresses my feelings about having my nails done by a 7-year old.

What, you saw a mini-theme in KAMALA HARRIS to YOU'VE GOT THIS to NOT AFRAID?

Seeing as I try to keep politics out of crosswords, you must have consumed one too many SAKE BOMBs.

While working with Mary Lou on this grid, I wondered if A LA MAISON would be interesting enough to include in the bottom-left corner. I thought it was funny as a foreign equivalent to something like Ali G IN DA HOUSE!

My French friends said, "Mais oui!"

While test solving, Jim Horne said, "Hmm … I SEE." (Meaning, not so much.)

Curious how that corner treats the Saturday solving population.

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I was so fooled by [Pittsburgh is its most populous city]. Given that this is supposed to be a hard puzzle, it couldn't be PENNSYLVANIA. Ah! There must be some trick to it, especially given that PENNSYLVANIA is too long. PENNSYL(VAN)IA with a VAN rebus fits perfectly! Now, where's the revealer, MINI VAN?

Drat.

Themeless puzzles often live and die on the quality and quantity of their long answers (8+ letters). It's so tough to make 6- and 7-letter entries stand out and feel fresh since crosswords use many more mid-length entries than longer ones. Seeing only ten long slots in today's grid worried me since themelesses usually have 12 to 16. Thankfully, Mary Lou and Erik used most of the slots well, MASTER BREWER and PRESS RELEASE excellent. PR = press release and public relations, what a neat connection!

PADMA LAKSHMI could be tough for many. I sort of recognized her name but put in PADME. Darn my Star Wars fanboyhood! Good thing MEISTER BREWER wasn't a possible crossing.

Wait. EI REBUS!

Maybe not.

I do wonder about UHURA crossing PADMA, though. Even as a die-hard Trekker, I often confuse UHURA with the Swahili word for peace, UHURU. If someone put in PUDMA LAKSHMI, I'd be sympathetic.

It is possible to excel in the mid-length space — take CALVIN for example. He's only been in the NYT (Shortz era) a few times, and he evokes such nostalgic memories.

You do run the risk of "freshness" in those mid-lengthers being taken as "annoying," though. QUIERO is a debut, but it might feel foreign (see what I did there?). A word I love, KATANAS, could cause alienation as well.

Let me explain two clues some might not get:

• Defaults = EDITS? Think about removing fat as "defat." I know, groan!
• ASS is one of those young people things, as in "big-ass" or "stupid-ass." Sometimes these fresh slang clues make me feel like a dumb-ass, but I can see how millennials would appreciate this sort of thing.

Not my favorite themeless from either of these excellent constructors, but solid enough work.

Who knew there were so many boxing-inspired idioms out there? Wait … all of them exactly 15 letters? It's a crossword constructor's dream!

Such juicy phrases, too. HIT BELOW THE BELT all the way to PULL ONE'S PUNCHES; each one is snazzy, albeit violent. I'd insert commentary about America's dangerous obsession with all things head-smashing here, but you've already heard it, I'm sure. Doesn't stop me from watching football highlights, anyway.

SPARRING PARTNER did stick out, feeling a bit "one of these things is not like the other." The rest of them are figures of speech, widely used in other aspects of life. SPARRING PARTNER works with debate practice, etc., but I associate it much more strongly with the boxing world than outside of it.

Huge constraints — 5 themers of 15-letters is usually a recipe for disaster. That's so much real estate taken up that there's rarely any room for bonuses, and a big bottle of crossword glue is often required to hold everything together. I finished with an error, ERETU/IDEO instead of ERITU/IDIO, and although it is my fault, I'm sympathetic to others who made the same mistake.

I'd have also liked a story in the crossword, created by a strong sequence in the themers. Maybe THE GLOVES ARE OFF!, let's go, I ain't gonna PULL ONE'S PUNCHES! Guh, you HIT me BELOW THE BELT?! Fine, I'll THROW IN THE TOWEL!

Maybe I've been reading too many "Highlights" magazines to my kids. The "put the four cartoons in the proper sequence" always seem to trip me up. I mean, trip up my kids! I always get them right. Sometimes.

I might be pulling my punches because I'm a big fan of Mary Lou's, and I'm hoping for the best for her medical condition. This wasn't my favorite of her puzzles due to a lot of issues in execution — close to a TKO — but I did enjoy the eye-opener of just how many boxing-related figures of speech there are.

MARCH comes in like a LION, out like a LAMB. Great fodder for crossword interpretation.

Solid phrases, MARCH OF PROGRESS, showing a progression from WINTER WONDERLAND to SPRING HAS SPRUNG. I liked that notion. I did wonder about WINTER WONDERLAND, which is the opposite of being like a lion — more gentle and lamb-esque, yeah? But WINTER WONDERLAND is fun to say, so I let it slide.

Not hot on the word ladder, though. So many word ladders have been done over the years that one has to be sizzlingly incredible to stand out. The motion from LION to LAMB is a good raison d'etre, but if you have to include LIMN, that's a reason to brainstorm other ways of showing LION -> LAMB.

I wondered if my cringing reaction to a featured rung in the ladder was unfounded. I had seen it recently in a Matt Gaffney metapuzzle, where Matt had painted himself into an extremely difficult corner to fill. Matt's one of the best, and he admitted that compromises had to be made.

Joon Pahk, who's way smarter than me — a former physics prof, winner of six-figures on "Jeopardy!" — agreed, tactfully saying "LIMN is an unusual word."

I asked my wife Jill, who went to Harvard, then med school, and is always educating herself in new subjects. She knew what it meant, but said she wouldn't use it in conversation, for fear of 1.) mispronouncing it and 2.) the other person not understanding her.

Out of curiosity, I wondered how long a ladder would be required if you used only "good" words. I came up with LION LOON LOIN LAIN LAWN DAWN DAMN DAMP LAMP LAMB. Yikes, much longer. And admittedly, LAIN isn't great.

Now, I did enjoy the bonuses in the fill. CORDON BLEU, LET IT SLIDE, GIANT PANDA are fantastic. Spiced up the solve.

HEAR THINGS felt a tad off though, not as strong as HEARING THINGS. And ooh my, OMOO was the only thing that could be jammed in between LION and MARCH OF PROGRESS? Oof. Or should I say, OXX?

A strong idea, with three fun, colorful themers. But I would have enjoyed a simpler idea more: LION at 1-A, and LAMB as the final across answer.

Day 4 of WTF? Week at XWI! I love having the chance to tell people What I'm Thankful For.

Today I'm thankful for ML's perseverance. She comes up with some of the toughest concepts of any collaborator, and she doesn't give up when they prove to require dozens of hours to iterate. Never say die!

This grid was one of the top ten hardest 15x15s I've ever worked on — maybe even top five — and I nearly threw in the towel on four separate occasions. Rebus squares are easy to work with, but two in close proximity is asking for trouble.

Five?

FIVE?

I almost said no right from the get-go after I heard that number!

It's so satisfying to have worked through the grinding process and come out with a grid that we're both happy with. I'm so glad that ML included me in this concept — it's a great feeling to have all that hard work lead to a publication.

I've been interested in MICROLOANS for a while now, and I still think that it's an interesting concept even though the research doesn't show great economic results. The jury's still out on whether the MICROLOAN industry will eventually provide wide-ranging financial lifts to the poor, but it was a fun enough crossword conceit that I put aside my rebus fatigue (I rarely work on them these days, considering how few editors take them) and agreed to hop on board.

Such a tall order, to spread out the five rebus squares. But I understood where Will was coming from — not a lot of fun to work through a rebus puzzle and then realize an entire region wasn't thematic.

Getting a fifth square around the MICROLOANS revealer was so tricky. Tucking it into VARIOUS / ENVIOUS didn't make for fantastic rebus entries (I prefer jazzy multi-word phrases like GRACIOUS ME or broken across words like WHY I OUGHTA), but it did end up working out.

Wish we could have worked in just a bit more spice in addition to STEINEM, ZINGERS, ALADDIN, IT HELP, but you can only do so much when working with a ton of constraints. Made for such a tough set of trade-offs. Hope it was enough to keep solvers happy!

ML got in touch with me last year, asking if I'd help redo this grid, but the concept didn't resonate. Maybe I just don't appreciate VDay? Or the themers felt too overt, not playful? Or I couldn't get past the asymmetry?

I counterproposed a mini-theme that would run as a (mirror symmetry) themeless the Friday before VDay, with something like BOXING GLOVES / GARLIC CLOVES / THE ARTS. But Will felt that was too subtle.

What about a heart-shaped grid with LOVE TRUMPS HATE down the middle? Too political. Good point!

So, it just wasn't for me, and I passed. But I can see how VDay fanatics could dig what's going on, HEARTSTRINGS / CUPIDS ARROWS / SAINT VALENTINE forming a loose VDay theme. I would have preferred something tighter for a themed puzzle though; a stronger connection between the three themers. Not just "stuff related to VDay."

Mostly solid gridwork though, snappy entries in GO ON A SPREE, STATE SENATORS, ROTISSERIE, NEVERLAND, even BOATYARD, SO AND SOS and MARION ROSS (hands up for a childhood crush on Mrs. C?).

I don't mind a bit of EEO and TAS — I used to see EEO all the time when I was hiring for our startup way back when, and I had plenty of TAS even further back.

TIRO and TWPS are much, much more egregious to me, though. Not just TYRO, but a variant of it? Yikes! And TWPS is … twerps? TW Power Services of Australia? It's "townships"?

Huh.

And DINGE. Dingy, sure. But DINGE sticks out like some dinge on the puzzle.

I think the compromises to get the themeless-like feel to the puzzle were okay overall, but oof, did those three bits jar me out of my solve.

I still have a lot of trouble getting past the lack of symmetry inside the puzzle. The annoyingly OCD constructor inside me wants some reason for it, like Joe Krozel's clever BROKEN HEART concept. But I can appreciate the novelty of the puzzle, as well as the heartfelt sentiment from ML.

For years and years, Liz Gorski had been doing wonderful Xmas dot-to-dot Sunday puzzles for the NYT. It had been a while, so Mary Lou and I decided to try to carry on the tradition.

But what shape to make? We threw out a bunch of ideas, and the one that stuck was RUDOLPH prancing through the skies, with his RED nose lit up. Easy-peasy, right?

Um … no. We needed to flesh out the idea with some themers, and ML found a nice split of THE MOST FAMOUS / REINDEER OF ALL. Along with some other assorted RUDOLPH-related answers, it felt like the grid wouldn't be so bad to construct.

Wrong!

So very, very wrong.

Like, miserably wrong.

Grinch-level wrong.

Just testing out different arrangements of where to start the path took forever, as we kept having to adjust the position of every single circled letter. And then sometimes one felt like it might be amenable … except for some stupid little corner. I probably restarted the process 50 times before hitting on the current arrangement.

But it just got harder from there. The biggest problem was that it's really hard to make a 140-word Sunday puzzle, period, and it's much harder to do it when every region of your grid is constrained. Sure, we could shift around letters a little bit here and there, but then they'd get in the way of the themers, or they'd make RUDOLPH look like he was limping, etc.

I should have studied Liz's work more carefully — in most of her dot-to-dots, she did well to spread out her letters through the grid in such a way that they didn't interact with the themers, or she used much fewer than 26 dots.

Live and learn. Given how much frustration and sleeplessness it caused me, I doubt I'll ever make another dot-to-dot. (Unless it just has two dots. Anyone have ideas for a LINE theme?)

Happy holidays!

ML asked me to come on board with this one after an encouraging rejection from Will. It's so tempting to try to fix a few little spots here and there on a themeless … but often, the skeleton and basic structure make that near impossible.

We decided to do a total teardown, starting with ML's (and Will's) favorite entries: I MEAN, REALLY! and RIJKSMUSEUM. I love the former as a colloquial phrase, and the latter as a place of incredible beauty (and weird consonant patterns!). If you ever get the chance to travel internationally and can't figure out where, the Netherlands is amazing.

As I mentioned yesterday, 11-letter entries are problematic for themelesses. ML originally had stacked sets of 11s in the corners, but that's a rough way to start — you force a bunch of 3-letter slots right off the bat, and too many of those can make for a choppy solve. So I repositioned those 11s more toward the middle of the puzzle.

It quickly became apparent that a few cheater squares would help out, and I'm pretty liberal in that aspect of constructing. I didn't like nibbling away a precious 8-letter slot into a 7-letter one, but thankfully COSPLAY seemed to work there. (I'd totally dress up as a Klingon at ComicCon, BTW.)

I like trying multiple dozens of versions of every region within a themeless. Luckily, ML graciously puts up with my OCD about exploring the entire solution space. We saved so many versions that I didn't remember which one we finally submitted. Thankfully, ML has a good eye for what's the best trade-off between strong entries and gluey short ones.

Looking back on it, I would have tried to open up the NW and SE corners, which feel more disconnected from the rest of the puzzle than I like. It did let us easily try many dozens of versions in each area, but with so few entries connecting everything up, hopefully solvers don't get stumped on LAKSHMI or RIJKSMUSEUM.

Themelesses featuring interlocking 15-letter answers often suffer in their short fill — the grid skeleton can be so inflexible. You often need a flood of crossword glue to hold it together, or have some of your feature entries be more neutral than standout. I thought ML did well to keep her crossword glue fairly minimal, considering she interlocked SIX grid-spanners, while giving us some good feature entries.

I loved TRIPLE WORD SCORE plus its clue, the misdirectional [Red square] (lower-case S!). THE PLOT THICKENS is fantastic too, evoking images of a detective's or even criminal's musings.

ANYONE LISTENING — I wanted so badly for there to be an IS preceding it. Ah well.

Neat to get SHIRLEY CHISHOLM, along with her ground-breaking election to Congress in 1968. Honestly, I couldn't remember the spelling of her last name, so it took me most every cross. But I got a real lift from piecing it together, pulling out thoughts of the civil rights movement.

TAYLOR SCHILLING … I'm not hot on featuring celebs in themelesses unless they're megastars. I've watched two full seasons of "Orange is the New Black," but I still needed every crossing answer to work out her name. And even then, I didn't know what character she played.

I do like that the NYT is giving exposure to an on-the-cusp-of-greatness star, but it felt more like being educated than being entertained.

With so many long entries constraining the grid, it wasn't a surprise to get a few rough spots. Manuel NEUER? And that IS AT (feels awkward) / NHRA (tough acronym) / ARNO corner was inelegant. Areas near intersections of two long themers have huge potential to give a constructor fits.

I don't mind a little SGTS, VOS, EEGS, EPI, ARIE / ISLIP, but as a whole … Thankfully, ML managed to keep it mostly spread out, not too concentrated in any one region.

I appreciated the bonuses of IT'S NOT FAIR, HIGH SIERRA, and SPORCLE (a provider of quizzes). That last one may be rough for some, what with it crossing NECCO and TAYLOR.

Kind of a lot of proper names in all, making it feel heavier on trivia than clever wordplay. But still entertaining.

I enjoy working on grids with ML. She sent me this one after a rejection — there had been too many unsavory short gluey words — and asked if I could help her redo it. I liked the skeleton of 15s, NO DAY AT THE BEACH feeling particularly relevant, so off we went.

I've commented before on how tough themelesses can be when you fix a large skeleton of interlocking answers into place, and this one was no different. We actually had to tear the entire thing down to the bare studs, move a whole bunch of black squares around, and try dozens of arrangements to find one that gave us even a modicum of flexibility. It was very important to me to get more sparkly answers into the grid than just those 15s, and that's tough to do — there's virtually no place in the grid that allows much freedom to breathe.

We settled upon a few long slots in the NW / SE corners, and although I do like RAN A RISK, ANOMALIES, NO-GO AREAS, and NOBLESSE pretty well, they didn't sizzle as much as I wanted. But working more colorful answers into all four slots would have meant using big globs of crossword glue, and there already was some present due to the skeleton's trickiness. Always the trade-offs.

A similar story for the other two corners, with END IN A TIE and TRANSLATE not as stellar as I would have liked, but they allowed for clean(-ish) corners. Also, they seemed like they could be ripe for really clever clues, which is a trick Patrick Berry often uses to spice up the less colorful long entries in his ultraclean grids. If we could have come up with a sizzling clue for TRANSLATE for example, I think it could have flipped the neutral entry into something memorable. My offering — [Turn chat into cat, say] — is an attempt to mislead away from the fact that "chat" is the French word for "cat." Looking back on it, I don't think it really works though. Drat.

I love mini-themes in themeless puzzles — they can be such a nice little treat. The crossing ALL HALLOWS EVE and LORD VOLDEMORT did make for a constructing challenge, though, sort of breaking up the grid into four quadrants. We tried to equalize the quadrants, leaving mostly 8-letter slots all around, for ease of filling.

The SW and NE corners weren't so bad, especially after ML suggested the lovely LE FIGARO to fill the tough ??????RO slot we were working with. I put in LIFE HACK in the symmetrical slot, and both of those corners fell pretty quickly. We considered a few different options for the SW, since LENGTHS is a bit dry, but we both loved one of our first tries at the NE, with PIANO BAR / IDIOLECT / TED TALK and even ARMPIT / AD REP colorful pieces of language.

The opposite corners were much harder. They wouldn't have been, if we had broken up LASER BEAM and I WONT DO IT into two words apiece (with a black square at the B of LASER BEAM and the N of I WONT DO IT), but I just hated to lose that long slot.

My stubbornness led to all sorts of issues in terms of clean and colorful fill, and I debated greatly whether all those cheater squares (the black square in the very lower left, the one under ALL HALLOWS EVE, and the one after MINETA) was just too much. In the end, we decided that the visual effect wasn't too badly hurt, and it allowed us to retain LASER BEAM and I WONT DO IT. (Talk about WHOA WHOA and HARD SELL!)

MIDDLE NAME = themers with NAME hidden across two words. Excellent finds in ARIZONA MEMORIAL and CAPTAIN AMERICA, the latter one of my favorite superheroes. Fascinating, his struggle to find his place in a modern world that's left his WWII-era persona far behind.

Five long themers makes for a tough construction. I like ML's efforts to spice up the grid with bonuses, even in the face of such a difficult task. DRAGSTER is great, and GOTHIC is image-evoking. I wasn't a fan of ZIP DRIVE, since those are 1.) outdated and 2.) don't have the groundbreaking quality of something like FLOPPY DISK.

BAD GIRL also made me hitch, as did ONE REED. The former is laden with all sort of negative connotations, and the latter isn't something I've ever heard in my 20 years of orchestra. DOUBLE REED for oboes and SINGLE REED for clarinets, but ONE REED felt iffy at best.

With so much going on, it wasn't a surprise to see some gluey spots. The north section, already having to work with VIETNAM ERA and BARCELONA METRO, became even tougher with the addition of BAD GIRL. That forced an AA ending in ABAA. And with a tough AQABA / QOM crossing plus the pluralized AVAS, it's a lot in just one little place.

The west and east sections are where you'd usually expect signs of stress in a puzzle featuring so many long themers. The east turned out okay, with just the IDIO prefix as glue, but the west has both ABRA and TROI. Both are reasonably fine by me personally, since I'm a Trekkie, but it's not unusual to see this type of crossword glue when the ends of long themers have to work together.

It was good to hear from her that this puzzle is from three+ years ago. Her constructing skills have come a long way since then.

I personally like "word hidden in phrases" puzzle more when there's some extra layer — using different but related words, a really incredible single word, a revealer that's really funny, etc. — but ML had some nice finds, especially CAPTAIN AMERICA, and the MIDDLE NAME revealer was apt.

I really like it when a puzzle forces me to rethink my criteria. For themelesses, I often begin by counting the liabilities: the inelegant bits required to hold a puzzle's long answers together (ONT, for example). If that's more than about four, it feels inelegant, like seeing duct tape or rusty nails holding a piece of fine art together.

For my second criterion, I start by tallying up the assets: vivid, colorful entries (GOSH DARN, e.g.). I add a few points if there's an impressive feature (grid-spanning entries, huge white spaces, etc.), and then subtract the number of liabilities. I've found that if that final result is more than about 10, I love the puzzle. Less than 10 and I don't feel sated, more like eating low-sodium bread than a big fat everything pizza.

Today's puzzle doesn't have that many long entries — just eight of 8+ letters — and some of them I'd consider neutral. PINED FOR feels fine but not something I'd tweet about, and the SOLOMONS would have been better if it had gotten an interesting piece of trivia. There are a few nice seven-letter entries like STARMAP and CODE RED, but even then, the quantity of what I'd call assets isn't very high.

There is something pretty cool about having four grid-spanners intersecting each other — and it makes the construction way harder — so I'd add maybe two points for that.

Given those intersecting long entries, it's not a surprise to see gluey bits like ESAS, LTS, RRS, OLD AS, RETIN, CALS (usually just "cal"), LEM, etc. They are all minor, but there sure are a lot.

So my calculations should predict that my stomach would still be grumbling after low-sodium bread. But I couldn't stop looking at MALALA YOUSAFZAI / PIZZA MARGHERITA / ALL KIDDING ASIDE / LAID IT ON THE LINE. They're all great answers, and I've been wondering when we'd see MALALA's crossword-friendly name. (The bestseller I AM MALALA, too!) To get her full name, with its mind-bending -FZAI ending is such a treat. There's so much to like in that one answer alone.

I'm still trying to figure out why I enjoyed this puzzle so much. Love it when the unexpected happens.

Fun finds, two-word phrases where one of the words is REDUNDANT. I had seen END RESULT discussed in this way a while back, but I hadn't thought of TWELVE NOON, FIRST BEGAN, REVERT BACK, and especially HEAD HONCHO like this. HONCHO by itself is a fine word, but it sounds so dull compared to HEAD HONCHO. English is a funny language.

More colorful fill than I'm used to in a Monday puzzle. I love CON MEN, THE NERVE!, MINERVA, ROOSTER (which is slang for my favorite Sriracha hot sauce). Even BANISTER I haven't seen in a couple of years. It's tough to work with six theme answers period, so incorporating such great pieces of fill is a real plus.

ATALANTA … I vaguely remember her, but not nearly as well as MINERVA (the Roman equivalent of Athena). Very glad ML was careful with her crossings, keeping the puzzle fair even for beginners. It would have been ugly if she had crossed SOAVE with ATALANTA, for example.

LIGHTS ON … that didn't strike me well at first, and it still hasn't grown on me. THE LIGHTS ARE ON, perhaps? It's a shame LIGHT SON (as opposed to a heavy one) isn't a thing. It feels like a long slot went wasted.

With so many themers plus the quantity of long fill, there was bound to be a couple of rough patches. I generally am fine with stuff like AT BAR, since that seems to stand on its own (a case is AT BAR in court), but AS FAR I'd never use without another AS, and BY AGE feels partialish to me as well.

I did love seeing Steve KERR in the grid, the Dubs' (Golden State Warriors) coach, who's navigated the transition from role player to coach amazingly well.

Neat REDUNDANT phrases, with some outstanding long fill along with some iffy entries.

I really enjoy brainstorming with ML. Sometimes we both LOVE an idea so much that we pursue it as co-collaborators, and sometimes only one of us feels strongly enough to put the work in. It's always fun.

In this case, I wasn't super interested in a LOVE rebus, but perhaps interested in doing an anti-Valentine's Day puzzle, with SHOT THROUGH THE HEART piercing the heart. For most of my 30s, I was single and pretty sick of hearing all the schmoopy-schmoopy talk around VALENTINES DAY, so I thought it would be fun to give a shout-out to all those kindred spirits out there bombarded by the pressure of the artificial holiday.

Needless to say, I doubt many editors would have gone for it. Ahem.

I enjoyed finding those seven LOVE rebus squares. It's fun to get songs with catchy lyrics like IS THIS LOVE and LOVE ME DO (and You Give Love a Bad Name — just sayin').

I remember being worried about how difficult it would be to fill the great big chunky section inside the heart. Impressive that ML did it fairly cleanly — while incorporating TWO rebus squares! CAN YOU FEEL THE LOVE TONIGHT crossing TOUGH LOVE and ART LOVERS already constrains that section tremendously, so it's nice work to weave FELT TIP and CAREENS in there. CMD and DSO (distinguished service … order?) are crossword glue, and BLU is hard to clue any other way than [___-Ray], but that's not bad at all for such a giant white space.

There are also some biggish areas necessitated by the grid design, and long answers like AMOUNTS TO and SAMMY CAHN intersecting IS THIS LOVE will almost always necessitate some trade-offs like RIN / RESAND / ESE. But there was enough bonus fill — DEAL WITH IT!, OMICRON, and my favorite, HOT MESS — along with colorful themers, that I didn't mind.

Entertaining VDay solve, one that hopefully even the singles of the world can enjoy.

I loved WHAT MORE CAN I SAY and GO AT A SNAILS PACE, answers that felt like they could hit a broad audience with strong effect. And CANNERY ROW has a special place in my heart, as my favorite Steinbeck novel. It was harder for me to appreciate A MODEST PROPOSAL, as I didn't recognize it, but some Googling shows that it's taught in some school curricula.

Not being very well versed in pop culture, it was harder yet for me to appreciate SHAILENE WOODLEY and JESSICA CHASTAIN. I forced myself to go Google them, and afterward I especially appreciated Chastain's recent meteoric rise — such big roles in a short span of time! I'm sure some solvers will get a thrill out of seeing these two names (and A MODEST PROPOSAL), but I wonder how many who don't already know them will bother to look them up.

For me, that's a problem with themeless puzzles featuring full names that aren't of uberstratospheric star quality. I do appreciate learning a tidbit or two from my crossword, but sometimes that's not a very fun process for me.

Themeless grids featuring grid-spanning 15-letter entries are so tough to execute on, as those long entries tend to lock down the entire grid, choking flexibiilty to near zero. This one, with six grid-spanners and two other long answers, makes for quite a challenge. Every single subsection of the grid is so constrained by those eight long answers, making clean filling so difficult.

Not only that, but as soon as you fill one little area, that further restricts the region next to it ... which was already constrained to begin with! Very, very tough. Thankfully, most of the crossword glue like SENAT, AMPAS, ELEC, ABAFT, IRAE, PREV, etc. is spread out today, but it felt like a lot in aggregate.

The clue for ASCII made this nerd smile. ASCII — American Standard Code for Information Interchange — is a standard part of nerd culture. It has a chart mapping codes to symbols and letters, which makes it a fertile ground for various code puzzles.

So, not my favorite style of themeless, but I bet fans of Woodley and Chastain will get a kick out of seeing their full names in the NYT crossword.

I enjoy working with mirror symmetry, which we needed for this theme (lengths of 9, 13, and 11 make regular symmetry impossible). Not only is it an interesting challenge given its idiosyncrasies, but you usually have to place a horizontal line of three (or more) blocks across the middle column. Put in a few stairstep squares, and it's almost hard to avoid giving your puzzle a smile.

We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to give the solver bonus fill, adding to their fun. Usually, I like to work in at least six longer entries, stuff like HEALTHY GLOW, BOB AND WEAVE, and MINUS SIGN. The AMERICANO is my drink of choice at Starbucks, so that was fun too. I sure would have liked for us to work in one more pair of long answers, but that just strained the grid too much with little gluey bits everywhere. And what's most important — by far — is how much fun the solver has. Ah well, ICE BOX, AIRBOAT, PC CLONE, and (my childhood favorite) ASTERIX will have to do.

ML's great idea, making candy cane shapes out of black squares. And then when she paired CANDY CANE with ST NICHOLAS (who's tied to CANDY CANEs by legend), it seemed nearly perfect. If we could only figure out what might fit in those "unchecked" squares in the crooks of the candy canes …

The engineer in me laid out the X M A S in left to right, top to bottom sequential order (the M to the west, the A to the east, and S in the south). It should be logical and orderly, dammit! ML very tactfully pointed out that this looked weird. Being weird, I took this as a compliment.

Thankfully, ML managed to convince me that a clockwise ordering of X M A S made much more sense.

We started with a 64-word grid (the block between AL HIRT and RCA removed). I like a challenge, and going down that low — along with the puzzle already being constrained by the candy cane blocks and the pair of mini-themers — seemed like a fun adventure.

After laying out many skeletons and testing to see which would give us the most flexibility, we barreled into the east section. We had the OPERA???? pattern in place pretty early, and we tried many different things (BUFF, COAT, DIVA, FANS, GOER, HATS, SOLO, STAR, etc.) before OPERA CAPE lent itself to snappy fill. MSRP / OCT / SEP weren't great, but getting SMART CAR / NO-LOOK PASS (I was a huge Magic Johnson fan) / IT'S A KEEPER / HALF-COCKED fill seemed well worth it.

The other three corners proved more challenging. It was only after weeks of work that we finally gave in and added the black squares to turn the 64-worder into a 66-worder. This allowed us to get in a lot of nice SEA MONSTER / KGB SPIES / AD AGENCY / TELENOVELA ("Jane the Virgin" fans, anyone?) / FREE RIDE stuff without much glue, but man oh man do I hate giving up. Anyway, who cares how many words there are — what's most important is how much entertainment the solver has.

Merry X A S M! Or whatever. Weirdo.

I co-construct with ML a lot, and one of the things I appreciate about her is that she introduces me to people and things I'm only vaguely familiar with. Sometimes she proposes an entry that makes me question if enough people will appreciate it, but often times it's pure gold. I don't know that I would personally think to put in Zooey DESCHANEL in a puzzle, but she's famous enough to not be an (unsatisfying) either-you-know-it-or-you-don't entry. Plus, she has a cool-looking last name and is a great actress. This is the kind of proper name I like seeing featured in a grid.

Interesting layout. The NW and SE corners look so gigantic, with four long entries stacked atop each other. But the central staircase is pretty easy to fill, with hardly any long answers in it. It's like ML purposefully chose to concentrate all her efforts on the two super-challenging corners.

Some good work in those two corners. I especially liked the SE, with PAT RILEY (ever hear the stories about how he would dunk his head into cold water to supposedly motivate his team?), MEDIA CLIP, and GO IN PEACE stacked. Even RAMPART is an interesting word. With only MUS and REICE holding the area together, that's strong work. Those two minor blights are the only things that keep the corner from being Berryesque.

I liked the NW too, although CADILLACS isn't as snazzy and colorful as, say, CROWN VICS. OLD FOGIES isn't bad, but I personally prefer my crosswords to be inspiring and/or uplifting — along with USE FORCE, the corner was a bit of a downer. The outdated REN and the odd plural, LAICS aren't great, but I don't mind ALIA, since it's common in Et ALIA, and ALIA Shawkat played a memorable Maeby Funke in "Arrested Development."

I liked getting GABRIELLE / GIFFORDS in the grid, but I couldn't remember who she was. Not nearly the smile I got from DESCHANEL, plus I don't value an entry split across two slots very highly.

So, a good number of long assets, but also some offsetting liabilities in the aforementioned, plus the weirdly spelled AMEBA (amoeba is the only way I knew it before crosswords), another RE- in RELAP, etc.

ML brought me in on this one late in the game. After I declined to work on it (I've sworn off word ladders for the most part), she showed me Will's message to her (see above). She knows me too well — there's nothing I like more than trying to pull off something that might not be possible.

So off I went, trying out skeleton arrangement after arrangement. Working with four long themers plus another six short words proved to be quite a challenge, but I just hate giving up.

I finally came up with something I liked, something that looked like the word ladder "flowed" from FOOL to SAGE. I wasn't a fan of the "jump" from the right to the left side, but I did like how TALL and TALE naturally served to link the two halves. I sent the rough skeleton back to ML, and she filled it in with a lot of nice stuff.

It's important to me to include at least a little bonus fill in every puzzle I work on, so I'm glad MONOLITH (huge "2001: A Space Odyssey" fan), SO SUE ME, and SEX SELLS made their way in. Even though I've become a bit snobby about candy these days, I do like me a Mr. GOODBAR every once in a while.

Both of us are big "Despicable Me" fans, so I'm glad ML pushed for GRU to get his 15 minutes, despite my hesitations.

As always, a pleasure working with ML!

ML's first solo themeless! Unusual layout, featuring six grid-spanners, laid out in a criss-cross style. This type of arrangement is tough to execute on cleanly, as every region around two crossing grid-spanners becomes highly constrained. And given that there are eight such intersections, which means that the entire puzzle faces tough constraints all over.

WAHOO! ML does quite well in smoothing out the short stuff holding the puzzle together. There's been some Facebook chatter about STRO, but I think it's a reasonable enough answer, especially for those fans in Houston. I imagine people not in Seattle would think I'm crazy for clueing THEMS as [Seattle's MLB team] = THE M'S, but it's super common here.

Really the only place I found tough was the south. I liked learning a tidbit about SAINT BEDE — the cross-reference works well because the answers are so close to each other — but not being familiar with BARI as an Italian port made the B a guess for me. There's an argument to be made that as an educated solver, I really ought to have known one of them. Grumble grumble, fine!

Ah, there was the KRIS KROS crisscross. KRIS felt much more like a real name of course, but END ON felt much more apt than END IN for [Finish with]. Darn my gullibility when it comes to B-list celebs!

Finally, A STROKE OF GENIUS regarding A STROKE OF GENIUS. Themelesses featuring grid-spanners rely on the long entries to be stellar, since there usually isn't much else of note besides them. Not only is A STROKE OF GENIUS fantastic in itself, but it's a devious trap. All the first letters were clued so easily that I quickly had ASTRO- as a start. So of course, [Something that's brilliant] had to be some sort of ASTRONOMICAL phenomenon, right? Just loved this trap, set up and sprung so fiendishly for a unique a-ha moment.

Hoping to see more of ML's byline on themelesses, and more diversity within themeless constructors in general. It would have never occurred to me to feature ELIZABETH WARREN or KROS — aaugh, KRIS! Kardashian — for example, so I like getting into the mind of someone who thinks very differently from me.

ML pointed out how the word COGNOSCENTI (or its singular COGNOSCENTE) was both interesting and appropriate to crossword people, and as usual, we were off to the races. After much iteration, we were able to come up with a center triple-stack all (loosely) related to "The Cask of Amontillado," one of my favorite Poe short stories. (Fortunato is a snooty COGNOSCENTE of Amontillado, and Montresor exploits that hubris in his plan for revenge.) When we realized Halloween would be on a Friday this year — ripe for an appropriate mini-theme — it felt like kismet.

We actually finished a first version with more blocks and more words (see left), which surprisingly turned out to be a little harder to fill well. Unusual for that to happen, but sometimes the letter patterns do tricky things. I was a little skeptical of SATE SAUCE, but a quick check with some of my Malaysian friends came back with the result that SATAY SAUCE in fact was the "incorrect" one (along with some appropriately snarky comments about how they wouldn't eat our Americanized Asian foods if they had been BURIED ALIVE and it was the only option). I was all ready to settle for the alternate grid, with its more choked-off grid (the NW flows into the rest of the puzzle so nicely in the original, and feels comparatively sectioned off in the alternate), so it was a pleasant surprise to be able to go with the more wide-open grid.

As an aside, Sanford and Son is one of my favorite shows of all time. If I had my druthers, that theme song would be playing in the background 24/7, and all grids would be filled with AUNT ESTHER swinging her purse at FRED SANFORD's face while spouting off her Bible verses, GRADY WILSON shuffling along with his wisecracks, and LAMONT's buddy ROLLO taking the brunt of Fred's ridiculous one-liners. Heck, even the horribly stereotypical AH CHEW makes me laugh. The entire show is so politically incorrect, it gives me an appreciation for how far things have come in 40 years.

I'm usually one for uplifting entries, grids and clues that make the solver finish with a sense of happiness, but sometimes exceptions keep things interesting. (Full disclosure, I had to sleep with the lights on after finishing "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.") Now, who's up for a nice glass of Amontillado? Just follow me downstairs...

Working with Mary Lou is a pleasure. She exemplifies one quality I think all good constructors must have: the ability to generate and sort through a ton of ideas. I find it takes maybe 10-20 ideas to discover one worthy of publication. Many times a person will give up after two or three theme ideas, but not her — I admire her determination and drive. When people talk about hard work leading to success, that's ML they're talking about.

As for this puzzle, I honestly was only lukewarm on the general idea at first. But when ML found five strong themers that worked, I thought twice. I'm a sucker for Muhammad Ali — "When We Were Kings," a documentary about the Rumble in the Jungle, cracked my vaunted Tier 2 list of favorite movies. (I only have 28 movies listed in my Top Tier; the most recent addition was "The Fighter.") The final hook was when she pointed out the challenge of executing this grid in a way that was both smooth and fun for solvers. I'm also a sucker for a challenge.

Five 15-letter themers is so rough. Four of them is hard enough because there's so many areas that get constrained, and five adds a real kick in the pants (not the good kind). There are so few places that aren't affected by two (or more) themers. The NE and SW were especially painful — there are five parallel answers from STATS to LEE which run through the same two themers; usually a situation you want to avoid like the plague. I don't much care for A TUNE and the visual of those lone cheater squares in the corners, but all the alternatives seemed worse. Grid-making is often an exercise in iteration, trying to sort through hundreds of possibilities in an attempt to figure out what would be most interesting / least grump-inducing for solvers.

It took us a lot of iterating, plus helpful feedback from Will, in order to get it to a place where we felt like it would be a fun experience for solvers. I wish we could have worked in some long fill besides ASHANTI, OH THAT? and IN ON IT, but every arrangement incorporating 8+ letter entries caused too much stress on the grid. As always, construction is rife with trade-offs.

Mary Lou, back with her second NYT in a month! I enjoyed this one, which featured (DOUBLE) ___ type themers, like a (DOUBLE) BARRELED shotgun and a (DOUBLE) AGENT, all tied together with a DOUBLE EDGED revealer hinting to the perimeter theme answers. Tight theme, nice.

As with all perimeter theme-type puzzles, fill can be quite tricky. Mary Lou and I have tackled a couple of these constructions together, and there's hardly ever zero compromises. She does well in creating her grid skeleton, which spreads around the white space pretty evenly. If you stand back and squint, not a single white space jumps out at you as bigger than the others, and that's generally what you want. One big space can slaughter you with its intense difficulty to fill.

Lovely selection of longer fill. TITLE ROLES, DEBUT ALBUM, OLIVER STONE, CLEAR THE AIR, yes yes yes yes! That's the way to pick snappy answers. Since the themers are all pretty short, the grid must contain some longer fill (due to the word count maximum) so it's super important to make good use of these spaces. Mary Lou does well here.

Ah, the difficulty of filling these bad boys. Corners like the NW and SE are always going to be tough, playing out like filling a themeless puzzle. The NW is pretty decent, only OEN, SLO, ELL, ERICAS as slight blights. The SW has some more issues, PERCALES being an oddity. When I searched it on Bing, the first answer that came up was the Wikipedia article on Pericles. Now, that may have more to do with Bing than anything, but it felt to me at best a missed opportunity to do something with that nice 8-letter entry slot. And man, is it going to be tough for people unfamiliar with SARAPES.

Sections like the west and east are typically easier to fill since there's not much constraining them like in the four corners, but since Mary Lou has long answers crossing them (TITLE ROLES and DEBUT ALBUM), things get hairy. AREEL, ESSE, and especially TELA create a bit of inelegance, as do CESTA, A HAT, SNEE. Perimeter puzzles are super tricky. Starting in the middle often creates problems in propagating fill out into the corners, and staring in the corners often creates problems in knitting the sections together.

Finally, some great stuff. [Better at picking things up?] wasn't pointing to SMARTER or anything, but TIDIER. And I love to see a clever clue for a shorty like SOD: [Cover some ground?] adds a lot of spice. Stuff like this really adds to my overall impressions of any puzzle.

Congrats on your Sunday NYT debut, Mary Lou! Interesting to see that in 2013, only eleven of the NYT Sunday puzzles were made by women (the awesome Liz Gorski had six of those). Glad to see Mary Lou join the club of Sunday constructors. As I've offered before, if you're a woman interested in working on a Sunday NYT puzzle submission and could use a hand or just some feedback, let's talk. If I can't help you, I'm sure we can find you someone that can. Let's do what we can to even up the stats, yeah? Contact me through the XWord Info home page.