Paul Coulter author page

The working title for this one was "Fast Food Critic." I'd noticed that several fairly recent slang expressions for disappointing items can be applied to fast food. I thought it would be cool to balance Weak Sauce and Nothing Burger with older expressions like No Great Shakes and (in my original submission) Hot Potato. This last one didn't quite work with the rest, but Andy Kravis suggested a revealer of HAPPY MEAL. Then the clueing angle of a fast-food critic's negative comments really came together. I think it's great how Will and his team are always willing to work with constructors to improve a semi-okay theme into one that has some zing.

Regulars at the L.A. Times Crossword Corner, where my puzzles appear quite frequently, have noted that I must be a foodie. Food-related themes pop up often in my grids. It's true that I love both eating and cooking. Back in the 70s, I worked my way through college as a frat house cook. Now that I'm retired, I have much time for both cooking and making crossword puzzles.

After checking the databases, I was surprised to see no one had done this theme before. There are countless possibilities for brain teasers. Some other favorites I didn't use:

And my favorite, though it's too long, the classic:

Then there was the title I originally submitted:

Bleachers Maine
0_23456789

This translates to NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ME, which I thought was appropriate.

The inspiration for this puzzle was the phrase, "I'm Tired." My son Dan is a new father — he and his wife Emily don't get much sleep, so they're often yawning. (Could be my frequent subject of the crosswords I'm constructing, of course, or other people's grids that blew me away.) Emily and Dan are patient with my chatter, but you know how it is — friends and family are either into crosswords or they're not. But when I realized "I'm Tired" could be a phrase said by cars, it was, ahem, off to the races. That would have been the title if this went to a publication that used them, and the revealer would have been something other than TIRE, such as TREAD.

I'd been trying to think of something interesting you could do with circles besides highlighting words. I'd played around with various ways to do eyes — dots, dashes, etc., but they weren't working. Then it struck me it would be a cute theme to have circled letters that look like tires, hence the Os. I usually do tricky, Fireball type puzzles — it was Will who saw this could make an early-week puzzle with a unique twist. He sent back my first crack because it had MERCURYSEVEN — Will wanted all the car makes to be current. LINCOLNLAW matching GERALDFORD also stalled out, but LINCOLNPENNY/ HARRISONFORD finally ran smoothly. I tried various grid designs, making sure to have no bumps in the road (blocks) between the pairs of circled Os. Much appreciation to Joel Fagliano, who was a tremendous help in improving the fill.

I'm a retired Biology professor, keeping busy now babysitting my one-year-old granddaughter Adeline, and setting a world record for most novels never published (35 and counting.) Long interested in cryptic crosswords, particularly of the fiendishly difficult British sort, I only recently began constructing American-style grids. I compete each year in ACPT and play in an over-the-hill soccer league on Sundays.