Tom Pepper author page

CHRISTINA: Tom and I met at ACPT through our mutual friend Andrea Carla Michaels, and connected over our shared Minnesota roots. We discussed themeless construction, and how sometimes when working solo we end up not knowing when to stop tinkering with a grid — we both had found ourselves frequently not being satisfied enough with a grid to move on to writing clues. My computer is full of themeless grids sans clues!

Collaborations, I have found, are a nice motivation for getting a puzzle over the finish line. We thought it would be fun to team up on a Saturday-level puzzle — the only day of the week Tom was missing to hit for the cycle. I'm excited to share a byline with him as he reaches the milestone!

TOM: Such a privilege and pleasure to team up with Christina! She provided the awesome seed entry/clue in THERMOMETER [Cold shower?], which I incorporated into a grid with the central stagger stack, and we took turns filling sections from there.

We hope the puzzle brought you a smile or two along the way!

I like words that can be parsed in a way that has a completely different meaning. I had a similar puzzle a few years ago about neckwear: PROPER TIES, CASUAL TIES, etc. My original submission for this puzzle was a 15x16 grid that led off with PRO VISIONARY and ended with PRO VOCATIONS. That version had 4 nice long non-theme downs, fewer 3-letter words, and placed the title entry at the end where I liked it.

Unfortunately, PROVISIONARY doesn't Google very well compared to "provisional," so Will and Joel asked if I could replace that theme answer. PRO TESTER was the best I could find. However, that meant placing the singular PRO VOCATION in the center of the new 15x15 grid, losing the long downs and forcing the two Utah-shaped black blocks on the left and right. In the end, it comes down to trade-offs, and the stronger theme answers make the revised version a better puzzle than the original grid that arguably had more interesting non-theme material.

My favorite clue—35D "Person who had a major part in the Bible?"—is the work of the editorial crew, whose efforts greatly improved the puzzle, as always. Thanks, Will and Joel—that made me smile! I hope the puzzle brings a smile or two to everyone else as well!

We first started talking about some kind of CIRCULAR REASONING puzzle at the 2015 Minnesota Crossword Tournament (where we'd met a few years prior, after both constructing puzzles, and hitting it off both interpersonally and cruciverbally). We started thinking about a Sunday-sized puzzle (a large circle of marked squares containing "CIRCULAR REASONING WORKS BECAUSE ..."), but we couldn't come up with enough good additional themers to go with the circled squares, so eventually we swapped to a 15x15 concept using a "circular rectangle" instead.

We went back and forth a bunch of times on the long entry, which had to be changed to have even length so it could fit as a rectangle — CIRCULAR REASONING {WORKS CORRECTLY, IS GOOD, IS USEFUL} BECAUSE ...? — before finally settling on Tom's idea of the MAKES NO SENSE version.

But the 15x15 version that we started with was, it turned out, a real bear to grid/fill to our satisfaction. It took a long while to figure out why, but eventually David realized how ambitious we were being: the two 14s imposed major constraints on the black squares in a 15x15 grid, plus the long 38-letter wrapped entry was causing some really tough letter combinations in both directions when it turned a corner — we had a ton of theme squares, and by necessity there also wasn't good separation between the theme entries. Switching to a 16x14 grid relaxed the black-square constraints from the 14-letter themers, and we were off and running.

Our original submission was a little nastier for the solver: we'd simply clued what's now 28-Around as 28-Across (and completely omitted the numbers in the squares now numbered 24, 32, and 50, which was the only hint that something strange was going on).

We hope that everyone enjoyed solving it!

A year ago, I was reading something that made mention of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words banned from the airwaves. I'd heard his stand-up routine on the subject a long time ago, but my recollection was fuzzy. I wondered how many of the seven I could name, so I made my guesses and then looked 'em up. Depending on how you score it, I got three or three and a half right (not tellin' which ones ... OR what my wrong guesses were!), and then the thought flashed: wouldn't THOSE be a riot to see in a puzzle! Well, of course that exact idea was going nowhere, but the DIRTY WORDS seed was planted. And the clue I submitted for 60-Across was [George Carlin's list of seven, or the starts ...].

While it's a simple and pretty vanilla theme, what appeals to me is the juxtaposition of the opulent FILTHY RICH against the modest (dirt cheap?) GREASY SPOONS, and the saintly STAINED GLASS against the irreverent DIRTY WORDS.

That and YERTLE the turtle.

So, here's mud in your eye—hope it was good, clean fun!

Tom:

In the original version, six of the eight black bars coming in from the edge of the puzzle were four deep, and the other two were three deep. Just looking at the puzzle would make you start choking. It was like nine little 4x4 puzzles. I tried to rewrite it to give it some air, but just couldn't get it to work. Those pesky edge-themers are so uncooperative! So I did what any reasonable constructor would do: I called a friend. Victor fixed the grid and offered some new theme answers that opened up better fill possibilities. The end result was a much, much better grid.

You can thank Victor for NINE WEST — I had no clue. In our final iterations, adding a black square to change TWO-FACED to TWO-FACE (and EIGHT HOURS to EIGHT DAYS) got us over the hump with only AMAD and APIE to really grumble about. At one point we had DIRTY POOL crossing SMARTASS in the SW, and I was sad to give that up, but I love DEATH STAR.

Victor:

This was a great project — Tom did most of the work, and I got half the credit! For those interested in the process, I think that 66-A is a marvelous illustration of how things evolve. Before the black-square change, it had NUDIST CAMP, and then in the revised version (final grid structure), it was SANTA CLARA, COMIC OPERA, and END OF AN ERA before settling on I AM A CAMERA. I hope that people enjoyed the puzzle — life is a cabaret!