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I'm thrilled to be making my New York Times Crossword debut! I'm a Brooklyn native currently enrolled as a sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis, double majoring in studio art and anthropology.

After a childhood of playing Bananagrams, logging countless hours on my laptop in Myst, and crafting complex scavenger hunts for my family, making crosswords seemed like the logical next step. In high school, I began solving the Mini every day. I soon graduated to solving the 15x15, and then to creating them. In my senior year, I joined my high school's student newspaper, where I published a 15x15 crossword each month.

I capped the school year off by constructing a four-page insert I dubbed Riddle Rampage, a multipuzzle extravaganza — inspired by The Times's Puzzle Mania — made over two months. I've continued puzzle-making in college, joining the puzzle section at WashU's Student Life, where I've been contributing ever since.

This puzzle's alliterative theme came from my name: Mac Motz. I had been intrigued by puzzles with clues all beginning with the same letter, and I wanted to take it a step further by having the same letter begin words not once, but twice, in each clue. The clues were simultaneously the most difficult and most fun part of this puzzle to create. I am also proud to be, at the time of this puzzle's publication, the 66th-youngest person and the 4th WashU student to have a 15x15 in The Times!

P.S. Something not mentioned in the Wordplay column that I feel inclined to address… my birth name is, in fact, Mac Motz, and it is not an alias (thanks, Mom and Dad, for giving me a cool name)!

– puzzle by Mac Motz

It's rare that I make a themed puzzle by myself. I'm lucky to live with the very talented Kevin Curry, who also just happens to be my life partner. (Ok ok fine, I admit it, he's the reason I got into constructing.) And my good buddy and hilarious co-constructor Mallory Montgomery is always just a text away. I'm often sending them half-baked ideas, since I don't generally start with fully-baked ones.

So what happened with this puzzle?? I honestly can't remember. But I do know from my email correspondence that an earlier version of the puzzle, with the revealer HOLES, was rejected. The reasons for rejections made 100% sense to me (extraneous Os; they already have too many rebusy-type puzzles).

I am pretty stubborn though, and I still thought there was a whisper of a good idea here, so I asked Kevin for his advice. He said, "What if you got rid of the extra Os and made it into a Sunday?"

I was tempted. I really wanted to have the themer RABBIT O crossing WONDERLAND, and moving to a Sunday-size would let me do that. But I also thought: What would I say in my resubmission notes? "Hey I know you didn't want this puzzle, but here it is again, and guess what? Now it's BIGGER!"

So I took some of his advice. I left the puzzle the same size, but I got rid of all of the extraneous Os. That was harder than I expected, as it turns out O is a pretty useful letter, being a vowel and all. I also got rid of the revealer, very reluctantly, because I could not for the life of me figure out some sort of "HOLE"-hiding word that could possibly be found in actual "HOLES". I flirted with the idea of putting SMALL O crossing HOLES, but in the end I decided against it. That was probably for the best.

– puzzle by Zhou Zhang

When I construct a crossword, one of my goals is to submit a high-quality original clue for each entry. If this sounds insane to you, I admit I felt pretty crazy myself when I read the proofs for this puzzle. Of the 72 clues I submitted, only 18 were kept verbatim, while 38 were changed all the way to a different cluing angle. So much of my effort wasted! Is the universe (i.e. the editorial team) sending me a sign to do something differently?

I had three hot takes:

1. I have terrible judgment about what constitutes a good clue, so the more effort I invest, the more reliably I create clues not worth publishing.
2. The editors are actually the ones with terrible judgment.
3. Originality in a crossword clue is valueless.

Unlike my hot takes, reality is nuanced and complicated. Accurate analysis does not consist of parceling out blame in correct proportions among three bitter contenders; rather, it is correctly interpreting events within a larger context. Possibly there is nothing for which to assign blame, because nothing went wrong.

Take, for example, the entry AT SEA. I submitted the clue {Out of one's depth} after verifying that Crosserville's database doesn't have "depth" in any of its 600+ instances of AT SEA clues. It was edited to {Befuddled}, which was the most common, clocking in at 45 prior appearances. The latter is so popular precisely because it is high-quality in multiple ways: it's concise; it's a close match without being a laydown; it's a fun word in its own right; it's comprehensible to almost all solvers; etc.

Typically, an original clue will have flaws that tried-and-true clues do not have. In this case, cluing an idiom with an idiom risks that either or both will be misconstrued as literal; the two figurative meanings don't exactly match each other (confused vs. inadequate to the situation); it's longer; it's less familiar; etc. Are the defects worth the possibility of creating an "aha moment" even for solvers who have encountered AT SEA over and over again? It depends.

Furthermore, at my stage of involvement, I can't know everything it depends on. The editorial team has additional information and additional constraints: maybe a test solver was offended by something; maybe the fact-checker debunked the premise; maybe something duplicates an entry in another puzzle in their pipeline; maybe a quadrant of the puzzle is shaping up to be too difficult and needs a foothold; maybe the character count has room to spare or is running particularly high; etc. All kinds of tradeoffs are best managed closer to publication.

My submission is a contribution to a team process rather than an attempt to single-handedly create a finished product. The editors have many jobs to do; I embrace the role of giving them creative raw material with which to do their jobs. Yes, I could have given them the best recycled clue I could find for each entry, but they can easily recycle clues themselves, case by case, if it is called for by all the considerations they have to balance. By providing a fresh clue for each entry, I gave them options they couldn't have gotten anywhere else.

In process terms, I can understand that even my clues that the editors cut were a positive contribution. It is reasonable for originality to play a larger role earlier in the process and a smaller role later on. I hope and trust that our team effort produced a better product than it would have if I had tried to make the editors superfluous. If I had gone out of my way to preempt everything that they do, I might well have left them with less work to do, but they would also have had less to work with.

Surely there is more than one right way to approach cluing, but I expect I will continue trying to submit a high-quality original clue for each entry. I'm content to be a cog in the machine, as opposed to trying to minimize the number of editorial changes that will happen after a puzzle passes out of my hands.

– puzzle by Fritz Juhnke

The idea for this puzzle came tactically: 99% of puzzles employ a left-right sequence to place the theme entries. Therefore, a puzzle whose theme entries were on the edges would (hopefully) stand out from the rest of the submissions and be more likely to be accepted.

I was inspired by the WALLFLOWERS theme last year and tried to find a similar revealer for a while. During a walk to clear my head, I happened to stop in front of a WALGREENS, and I realized it would make the perfect revealer. After an aborted arc of trying to find alternate ways of cluing the name of vegetables, I realized that using the names of colors would be more fruitful (no pun intended).

Funny story: I really wanted 45D to be MAMDANI, but I had to settle for MARTINI. I sent the grid to my statistics professor & cruciverablist Jonathan Gersch to see if he could find new fill options, and he suggested MANKINI.

– puzzle by Sunny Maharjan

Andrea: I am indebted to a third party for this puzzle: The Connections genius and bon vivant, Wyna Liu. The theme was inspired by one of her cool categories. We took words that followed another word, banana, put them in (hopefully) evocative phrases, then slapped on a high-energy reveal … et voilà! A classic Monday puzzle construction is born! We got the nicest acceptance letter from Christina Iverson. I'd like to quote from it below, as it was Dena who created the grid that made all of those elements Christina mentions happen:

"We have an extremely high bar for word-before themes, and we thought this cleared the bar with ease. The phrases are all fresh and fun, change meaning, and felt like a tight set, with not too many words following banana. The grid is really nice and clean as well."

Always interesting hashing out ideas with Dena, then having a blast creating together.

– puzzle by Andrea Carla Michaels and Dena R. Verkuil

I've been an indie map designer for the past decade, including a stretch of several years when it was my full-time gig. (I post and share online as "Barely Maps".)

When I got into crossword construction, my "Ideas" Google Doc was basically just map stuff: place names, state mottos, public transportation, etc. Most of it didn't translate to suitable theme material, but occasionally I'd find something that clicked. In my last two published puzzles, the revealers were U.S. cities.

For this one, I wanted to go "full map."

Utah is a really nice fit. It has 90-degree corners, a recognizable outline, and the right proportions for a square crossword grid. Not to mention, it's been in the spotlight before.

Thanks again to the editing team for helping bring this puzzle to life. I hope you enjoyed the solve!

– puzzle by Peter Gorman