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Some puzzles are a dream. Others fight tooth and nail not to exist.

Concept: It took upwards of a year off-and-on to work out what to do with the animals, where to place the magnets, what the mechanics were,
and what kinds of phrases should be "attracted" to each other.

Spreadsheet: I compiled 258 animals, 2,488 "forward" phrases, and 1,259 "backwards" phrases. Combing through them to find matching pairs took nearly a month. I read and re-read and re-re-read them until my eyes about fell out of my head.

Script: Then, list of candidates in hand, I couldn't figure out how to pick eight of them without duplicating some animal. All my favorite entries wanted ANT, RAT, and EEL for themselves. I had to write a constraint satisfaction script to crank through the permutations.

Gridding: This is as uncooperative a grid as I've ever met. The layout forced the themers to the edges, which meant stacks of long vertical answers on the sides. Combine that with turning answers and mirror symmetry and it was a recipe for migraines. The block placement was so finicky I bounced around between Ingrid, Crosserville, and Crossword Compiler to even get a fillable skeleton.

– puzzle by John Kugelman

If you assumed that we came up with the revealer or title of this puzzle first and aptly worked our way backwards from there to land on the theme... you would be wrong.

No, this puzzle began with the message "Here's one for ya: SEMI PERMEABLE MEMBRANE (21)", a text so quintessentially Rebecca-esque that Adam knew he'd write a constructor note about it someday. Specifically, Rebecca suggested a puzzle where some letters pass through a transformation and others don't. Adam replied that, while that revealer might be a liiiiiittle jargony for solvers less science-nerdy than we are, he was obsessed with the mechanic. It only took a few more minutes of themestorming to land on the revealer and execution, and then we were off to our code files and spreadsheets!

Normally we'd say it was a bear to grid and fill something this constrained, but this bear was a welcome distraction from many of the other bigger, scarier bears that the world was throwing at us last fall when we made it.

Meanwhile, can we appreciate how good the title "Tossing and Turning" is? That one's also all Rebecca, cracked at the last minute before submitting. In fact it's so good that Adam wanted to scrap the entire grid and start over with it as the revealer. For the sake of our sanities, we're both glad Rebecca talked him out of that.

– puzzle by Adam Wagner and Rebecca Goldstein

This puzzle was made during the summer break right before my senior year, accepted on Halloween, and is now in publication just a few days after I graduated from high school. The timeline goes crazy for sure. I will be heading to San Diego State University in the fall as a neuroscience major in the Honors College, which I am so stoked for.

Back to the puzzle. The revealer is REESES PIECES, with entries having three groups, RE ES ES, found separately in them. However, even with this seemingly tight constraint, there were a great deal of entries that fit that criteria. And so, I decided to make the theme even more restrictive by not allowing plural endings as the majority of entries ended in ES to act like a plural, like TRES LECHES CAKES. This only resulted in the three entries you see in this grid. Looking back at it, I could have changed the grid layout and theme entry placement slightly to make the overall solve a bit easier, but I am glad that it still found a home here nonetheless. I am especially glad to miraculously include TEEN as the last Across entry in the puzzle and that the Games team kept the personal reference I included in its clue.

If you're interested in collaborating on a puzzle, feel free to reach out to me via Discord @quackerdeezles (yes, I made this name when I was in elementary school, lol) or email me at tarunlive@live.com.

Lastly, I would also like to mention the Crosscord Discord server. We've got a wonderful community of solvers and constructors alike, and they are the sole reason I have grown in crossword construction. Come say hi! And, as always, thanks for solving!

– puzzle by Tarun Krishnamurthy

Hannah:

I got married last October, and while planning the wedding, I came across the phrase "wedding duress" and was really struck by the wordplay potential. (The concept may have also had some personal resonance... planning is stressful!). I brought it to my crossword constructor mom, as I sometimes do, and asked, "Would this make a good puzzle theme?" and that was the start of this puzzle. We started poring over Brides' websites, not for wedding planning ideas, but for words or phrases we could play with.

I would also like to note that while one of my brothers had his wedding announcement in the NYTimes, my wedding is now also sort of in the NYTimes. So there!

Ruth:

What could be better than creating a puzzle with my own daughter? Hobbies are always supposed to be fun, but sharing them with someone you love makes them even better. When Hannah proposed (pun intended) WEDDING DURESS as a fun concept for us to play with, we considered the various directions in which we could take it. Should we, for example, add "U" to various phrases with some kind of "You Too" theme? We landed on our wedding-specific, "Plus One" theme when it became clear that it had plenty of entertaining potential.

While Hannah is new to construction — this is her debut — she has a discerning eye for detail, and she routinely edits the puzzles that I write for my local NJ newspaper. Before I send them in for publication, she checks for errors, typos, or any unintended wrong vibe. In constructing this puzzle together, I took the lead on filling the puzzle, but we tried to give priority to her younger voice in writing the clues that we sent to the editors. We hope that you enjoyed the results!

– puzzle by Ruth Bloomfield Margolin and Hannah Margolin