Matthew Sewell author page

MATTHEW: I'm afraid to look at how many iterations we went through on this puzzle. I think the germ of the idea (ha) was mine, but the cool pots element — which took it from 'Hmm, maybe there's something there' to 'We have to find a way!' — was Jeff's.

We came up with a decent version and sent it in... and got a rejection from Will & Co. that said (as I recall) that they liked the idea, but pretty much nothing about our execution, including the revealer and most of the theme entries. Argh! Good thing neither Jeff nor I lack persistence.

It's a pleasure to see this one make the light of day at last, and I hope solvers enjoy the fruits (er... leaves?) of our efforts.

JEFF: Hopefully this puzzle grows on you ...

(Maybe that should have been "groans on you")

Solvers might be surprised to learn that 1-Across wasn't a seed entry for this puzzle; it wasn't even in the original submitted version. This puzzle began with the grid shape, which seemed interesting somehow (it's unusual in having a relatively low number of Across entries). I did the middle first, which I do NOT recommend as a construction strategy, and generated a number of variants for the big corners in the NW and SE.

The first version avoided infelicities like 6-Down at the expense of liveliness, and was rightly returned with a polite, "close but no cigar." I swapped in the corners you see today and tried my luck a second time, and I hope solvers enjoy the result. My thanks to Will Shortz and the rest of the puzzle team for their improvements to the finished product.

I guess you've got to stand for something! I hope solvers enjoy this mix of silliness (in the theme clues) and toughness (in the rest). This is one of those themes that seems at first to offer a lot of possibilities for entries ("Oh, I can put this together without too much trouble"), then reveals its complications in the execution ("@$#!") — especially after I added the extra constraint that each theme entry should come from a different genre. My thanks to Will and the rest of the team for their improvements to the puzzle.

The spark for this was hearing "Burning Love" on the radio. In a flash, I jotted down a few more theme candidates. I hope the relatively adventurous vocabulary for a Monday kindles some interest for solvers. My thanks to Will, Sam, and the NYT puzzle team for fanning this particular flame.

About two years ago, my friend and colleague Diana Joseph improved my life by sending me a link to "Sunday Candy" — and 34-Across is my way of repaying that debt. (I suppose the clue for 56-Across balances the sublime with the... well, sublime in another way.) I aimed for a good range of reference points in the clues, and I'm grateful to Will, Joel, and Sam (and everybody else on the NYT games team) for their improvements to the puzzle. I hope solvers enjoy the result.

I hope solvers have fun with this themeless; I was glad to be able to work in what seemed like a good variety of entries without too many compromises. As a solver, I enjoy when the mid-length entries are lively, and I felt like luck was on my side with this one — for example, 6-Down and 25-Across were both "Hm, I wonder if that would work..." ideas that panned out. I suppose that's a sideways way of saying that I didn't go looking for a 6-Down, but maybe sometimes you look up and you find yourself with one anyway. C'est la vie.

This became a pangram by accident: I had something different in the bottom-middle, but while writing the clues I noticed a minor duplication with another answer in the grid. Argh! The best fix brought in a Q, and there it was.

I appreciate Will and Joel's improvements to this puzzle, as well as the contributions of the test-solvers and the others involved in producing the final product.

I developed a very different version of this puzzle as a 15x15, but along the way I came to the sinking realization that though maybe the gimmick was technically interesting, it didn't seem like it would be especially enjoyable for solvers. I scrapped that approach, and asked myself how I might inject some fun into the idea... and, as often happens in life, posing the question in the right way was all it took to find a path forward.

My thanks to Will and Joel for their improvements, and I hope this provides an entertaining start to your puzzling year.

My friend and colleague David Clisbee used the phrase SCRAMBLE THE JETS in a meeting, and that was that. I wanted each theme entry to feature J-E-T-S in a different order — that plus all those Js made construction interesting. I'm grateful to Will and Joel for their improvements to this grid; I hope solvers enjoy encountering ROCKET J. SQUIRREL, and don't begrudge JULES ET JIM its French title.

I hope solvers share my pleasure in seeing CALVINBALL in a New York Times puzzle. It's such an evocative idea of pure creative play, and I liked balancing it with the more contemplative POOHSTICKS — very different visions of childhood (and philosophies of life), each lovely in their own ways.

I'm grateful to Will and Joel for their improvements to this grid, and I'm also indebted to two other editors who've helped immeasurably in my development as a constructor: Stan Newman and Brad Wilber. Brad's mentorship in particular has been a great boon to me — even though he had no direct involvement with this puzzle, it's fair to say it wouldn't exist without him — and I'm very happy to be able to acknowledge that publicly.