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Hey everyone! I'm a 14-year-old student from Singapore. I'm thrilled (and a little stunned) to be debuting today as one of the youngest constructors in the themeless puzzle genre. It was pretty surreal opening that acceptance email in the middle of the school day, which was followed by roughly 10 minutes of jumping and dancing (Sit down, Bryan, geography's starting soon …).

I started constructing last November while on a trip to Vietnam, and since then it's definitely cemented its spot into my daily life — I often jot down entries in the margins of my notes or think of clues in between classes.

Ironically, despite my passion for constructing, I'm still not that great at solving crosswords! I do enjoy picking up new words and phrases with each solve.

This puzzle was actually my first submission to a publication. My favorite entry has to be STAR-NOSED MOLE — such a bizarre and fascinating little creature. I'm very grateful to the Times puzzle editing team for their patience and guidance throughout the whole process.

Outside of crosswords, I enjoy acting, writing, drawing and cycling (which is the best way I know to clear my head).

Thanks for solving my first themeless puzzle! I hope you all enjoyed working through it as much as I did putting it together.

– puzzle by Bryan Cheong

This puzzle's theme was inspired by Jeff Chen's commentary on this website! Jeff is an incredibly prolific and accomplished constructor, so his commentary was a tremendous resource when I was learning about crossword construction. One puzzle had the entry TETE-A-TETE, which Jeff noted appears commonly, partly thanks to its "perfect vowel-consonant symmetry" which is friendly to construct around. I thought to myself, "I wonder if I could make a whole puzzle with alternating vowels!" I was working on a puzzle with a similar theme at the time, which was published in the NYT on January 16, 2024 (my debut puzzle!). If you liked today's puzzle, you should solve that one if you haven't already.

Other than VOWEL as a revealer, the grid was a blank slate which can be both a blessing and a curse. I opted for this grid with the two double stacks which quickly resolved my blank slate "problem." They were tricky to wrangle, but too striking and irresistible to pass up. I iterated on and off for over a year before happily submitting this version. Hope you enjoyed it!

I used a regex query along with Adam Aaronson's invaluable Wordlisted tool to modify my wordlist. Some numbers: Only 5% of my wordlist has alternating vowels, but that's mostly driven by the longer words: While 29% of 3-, 4-, and 5-letter words have alternating vowels, only 14 out of nearly 13,000 (or 0.1%) 15-letter words have alternating vowels. Of those 14, only 3 (!) begin with a vowel (the other one was ON A POSITIVE NOTE). Being able to stack two pairs of those 15-letter words in a relatively open grid with a limited wordlist demonstrates just how useful that vowel pattern is to constructors. Interestingly, I had nearly the opposite constraint in my first NYT puzzle, where the short fill was significantly more impacted than the long fill.

– puzzle by Marshal Herrmann

This puzzle was inspired by my crossword-cluing crutch, in a way. Or rather, this puzzle was inspired by my crossword cluing crutch: in a way.

I noticed while cluing a previous puzzle that I had ended six consecutive clues with ", in a way". It's just such a nifty qualifier to tack onto clues that don't quiiiiiite work as a bit of typographical hand-waving. I'm not proud of how much I use it — but I am proud of my ability to turn negatives into positives by making a theme out of it.

I couldn't find many good throwaway qualifiers beyond the five I put in the puzzle. There's ", in a word" — but there aren't any great splits of TERM that worked, and what else am I gonna do, use any word that is a word as the outer entry?

Meanwhile, you may have noticed this grid is 70 words, with big chonky corners. That wasn't me trying to flex my gridding skillz (though I'm sometimes guilty of that). RARE EVENT (9) had to go in the central spot, pinching the grid in half horizontally. And then whenever I have a themer that breaks the pattern I always put it in the final slot as a kicker, and the 'shell' part of 'in a nutshell' makes that one a little unique. So that meant having the 7-letter PELICAN in row 13, which forces block fingers that pinch the grid in half vertically. Ergo: chonkiness.

And yeah, could I have chopped some of those edge 7s into 3.3s? Sure... but I guess I actually did want to flex my gridding skillz a little bit after all.

See you next time!

– puzzle by Adam Wagner

Dena: As someone who has been watching The Simpsons since it debuted in 1989 (when I was the same age that Bart somehow still is), I am especially pleased with this puzzle's reveal. It all came together super quickly — Andrea and I brainstormed the idea on a Saturday and had the puzzle ready to submit by Tuesday.

I'd like to say it's a testament to how well we work together, but according to the number of projects sitting in my ACME file, it's certainly not the way it always goes, which makes sense, considering we rarely make it through a conversation without stopping to jot down an idea. More to come from us!

Andrea: I started off as a mentor to Dena, but she has now surpassed me, Grasshopper. We've now become good friends, and are equal collaborators.

This puzzle was spurred by something random I said while we were watching her husband Gibson perform a fabulous song he wrote for her called "The Constructrix". Once we realized we could crown this idea off with "D'Oh!" we were off and running!

I believe this is my 90th puzzle for the NYT…and with Dena in my life I hope to reach 100!

(Puzzle and age-wise)

– puzzle by Dena R. Verkuil and Andrea Carla Michaels