Matthew E. Paronto author page

Matthew:

I attended the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament for the first time in 2011. Roz Chast was the awards presenter that year. Before handing out the awards, she read a short essay. The essay humorously highlighted many of the entries that frequently appear in crosswords, commonly referred to as crosswordese. A year or so later, I returned to this essay and the idea of taking a set of common crossword entries and turning them into a puzzle. My idea was to make the crosswordese words the clues, and what would typically be the clues for these words, the answers.

I compiled a list of crosswordese words, but soon realized there needed to be more to this theme than just selecting a subset of these words and then developing theme answers that were of the appropriate length. So I revisited the list, and noticed a lot of these words began with the letter E. It then occurred to me that if all the words began with "E", a revealer for the puzzle could be CROSSWORDESE, which not only was a pun but also an apt description of the theme answer clues.

I passed the idea by Jeff, and he really liked it. One improvement he suggested immediately was to change one of the original theme clues — EEE (wide shoe spec) — to EMIR, as EEE was the only theme clue of the set that was not four letters long. Over time, there were further adjustments made in order to get theme answers to match up by length, which ultimately resulted in one of the original clues, the ever-popular EWER, being replaced by the equally crowd-pleasing ETUI.

In terms of filling the rest of the puzzle, we felt it was important to keep the crosswordese to a minimum. In general this is a good approach to take, but even more so when you're already drawing attention to crosswordese in the puzzle's theme. I think for the most part we were successful in this, the occasional ONO, ANAT, and OBOE notwithstanding.

Thanks for reading. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to work on my next puzzle: lesser-known, four-letter European rivers.

MATTHEW: Inspiration for this puzzle came while engaging in one of my favorite activities: list-making. Actually, the list aspect came later...

I originally tried to make this puzzle solo, but only got so far as the theme answers and a grid that remained mostly unfilled. Some months later, I saw an open invitation from Jeff on one of the crossword blogs to anyone interested in collaborating or just passing an idea by him and getting feedback. So I dusted off my idea, shared it with him, and so began our collaboration.

The first order of business was improving the theme answers. My biggest takeaway from this entire experience is the importance of having a tight, consistent theme, and there was room for improvement in what I had produced. We came up with a modified set of four theme answers (IT DIDN'T WASH, CAME UP DRY, WENT TO PRESS, IN THE FOLD), but still needed a good revealer. We brainstormed some ideas, such as LAUNDRY DAY and LAUNDRY SERVICE, but none of these worked; they were either too obscure or they had been done before. And then Jeff came up with the perfect revealer: LAUNDRY LIST. I really liked this as it tied everything together visually. The theme answers sort of resemble a list. With our improved theme, we proceeded with the grid and the fill, secure in the knowledge we'd knocked it out of the park. Not quite...

The feedback on the original submission was that the first theme answer, IT DIDN'T WASH, wasn't a familiar enough phrase. (In other words, it didn't wash.) Thus, the puzzle was rejected. Jeff suggested I propose an alternative answer that he devised, and as luck would have it, there was renewed interest in the puzzle. After some additional revisions based on Will's request to further tighten theme answer consistency, and an entire reconstruction of the puzzle...success!

Thank you for solving — and reading about — our puzzle!