Michael Shteyman author page

Today's puzzle has been in the making for over seven years, with several periods of intense activity punctuated by long hiatuses. Two complementary narratives account for this. The simpler one is that we--both being naturalized U.S. citizens--sought to pay tribute to our brave men and women in uniform on the annual federal holiday that honors their service and sacrifice, and to have this published on the 99th anniversary of the armistice signed at 11 a.m. on 11/11 (of the previous century) to end the hostilities of World War l.

More complicated, we initially targeted the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity afforded by 11/11/11 (a Friday) to try to work VETERANS DAY (11 letters), and perhaps THANK YOU FOR and YOUR SERVICE (both 11 letters), and then ELEVEN as a reveal, all into the same grid. However, Friday offerings tend to be themeless with wide-open relatively low-word-count grids, so our goal morphed into developing a puzzle with interlocking and/or stacked entries all of the same length [specifically 11, since good luck jam-packing a grid with twelve 12s a year, month, and day later, on 12/12/12].

In all, we examined at least a dozen grid skeletons comprising several hundred fills, with substantial tweaking of those that appeared most promising--all this via e-mail. We finally met in person in Baltimore to close this out, including clue writing, but we were too late and the Times ran Alex Vratsanos' puzzle with a different concept.

Deflated, we took a long hiatus until the approach of 2016, the next year that 11/11 would again fall on a Friday. Long story short, we again waited too long, and our submission was judged--by the increasingly rigorous standards in play these days--to have too many compromises in the fill. With 11/11/17 (a Saturday) looming just about a year away as a possibly final opportunity to implement the concept, we tried to keep some momentum and continued to experiment with grid designs and fill options--culminating with something reasonably close to the grid you see today.

The project was again set aside (with confidence, never actually put to the test, that fresh looks might produce even further variations) while other commitments took priority, but fortunately, we were able to reconvene just in time to complete everything for the present calendar year (2017).

My aging memory is a bit hazy on what went into making this puzzle or how it even came about. I blame the fact that the grid lay completed for a few years before I finally got to cluing it. Looking at the final product, I'm glad to see the majority of my clues survived Will's editorial touches. And those that didn't were significantly improved. I mean, how can you not like a fresh clue for HOAX referencing the current (and troubling) rise in fake news? Or the juicy medical details concerning the final minutes of our old papal standby LEO VII? Talk about being in seventh heaven and going to heaven at the same time.

This is my sixth Tuesday overall and the first in almost fifteen years (been over ten years since I had a Monday). Easy crosswords are paradoxically very hard to make and I tip my hat to those who can consistently create top-notch puzzles with vocabulary accessible to all levels of solvers (Lynn Lempel, Zhouqin Burnikel and Andrea Carla Michaels come to mind, to name a few). So even after all this time in the biz, I still have a lot to learn.

Happy New Year and happy solving!

Thousands of University of Minnesota students learning organic chemistry have read George's handout that reveals the four secrets of organic chemistry, the second of which is that "oil and water don't mix." Back in the spring of 2006, we were brainstorming in our usual ways via e-mail, IM chat, and occasional phone calls, and realized that LIKE_OIL_AND_WATER was 15 letters and could span the center of a grid. Recalling that the majority of organic liquids are less dense than water and hence form an upper phase after being shaken with water, it occurred to us to place oil-containing theme entries exclusively above the central entry, and water-containing entries exclusively below.

Early decisions were to have OIL and WATER both be rebuses (for a while we toyed with HHO or even HOH, but those ideas proved unworkable), to use left-right symmetry, and to separate the two phases by a staggered set of solid bold bars rather than full-sized blocks. Mike ran the concept by Will informally, but the project went into hibernation for several years until the summer of 2010. It was then that Mike realized that switching the positions of the words OIL and WATER in the central reveal would also allow a vertical T(oil)ET(water) entry to place rebus elements both above and below the divide.

Mike produced a few candidate grids that we worked together to polish over the next few months, and George saw how the word LAYER could be inserted near the lower bottom and could be clued to provide a final level of reveal. Will was hesitant for a long time, because he had never previously used bars in a Times weekday crossword, and he was also concerned about on-line solving. With hindsight, this delay turned out to be a positive, because so many other brilliant constructions that "push the envelope" have been published between the time our original ideas were formulated and the present day. For the two of us, this was a fun collaboration that played into our respective strengths, and we hope that solvers will like it too.