Meghan Morris author page
3 puzzles by Meghan Morris
with Constructor comments
Meghan Morris is an appellate public defender in Denver.
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I started constructing this puzzle just by building a grid that I thought looked nice and open. I then worked on the 15-letter entries that cross in the middle, as well as the NW and SE stacks. Once I had all that in place, I filled in the rest around it.
Looking back at the puzzle now, I particularly connect with the arc formed by 22-Across, 25-Across, and 28-Across. I [25-Across] convictions as a public defender; I have 4-year-old twins who love pretending to be [28-Across] who use magic to freeze their parents; and unfortunately, I went to a [22-Across] recently because one of those twins broke her arm. That hasn't stopped her from freezing her parents, though.
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I am so excited to be making my crossword constructing debut! I have loved doing puzzles of various kinds for as long as I can remember, and I submitted my first crossword to the New York Times in 2016. It was rejected, and not long afterward I got pregnant with twins, so that derailed my crossword-constructing career for a while.
During the pandemic, I decided to take another crack at it. I got two great mentors, Caitlin Reid and Sid Sivakumar, through the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory on Facebook, and they have helped me immensely. The learning curve is big! I am an appellate public defender, so I write quite a bit, but it turns out that putting words together in an appellate brief and putting words together in a crossword are very different skills. I submitted several puzzles last year that were rejected, always with thoughtful feedback, before this one was accepted.
This puzzle started out without the visual aspect. I just had three 15-letter theme answers containing ACUTE, OBTUSE, and RIGHT, and then a 15-letter revealer: WHAT IS YOUR ANGLE. But after going through a couple of iterations of the puzzle in that form, I decided to try adding in the visual aspect to make it more interesting. That really limited the theme entries I could use — it turns out there are only a couple of common 15-letter phrases with RIGHT in the center. So, I would like to give a shout-out to Spike Lee for making this puzzle possible.