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This is one of the earliest puzzles I submitted, when I was trying to put twists on rebuses. I hope solvers will enjoy the theme. It might be a tad easy, which may explain why Mr. Shortz toughened up most of the clues in the upper half. As a Florida resident, I can only wish for the temperature change hinted at in the ladder. Our seasons are pretty much summer, summer, SUMMER, and summer. Then again, being able to go snorkeling and play ultimate on the beach in January has its own charms!

FWIW, when I first started submitting puzzles, I received two rejection letters which said, in effect, ‘Nice idea, but we are about to run this same theme.' I got into the bad habit of rushing to pop a puzzle into the mailbox five seconds after finishing the fill, to get a jump on the imaginary competition. I've learned to let puzzles cool off for at least a couple of weeks.

Upon a fresh solve of my own puzzle, I usually find many areas for improvement (and, of course, a couple of entries I wish I could improve, but just have to live with). This was perfectly illustrated when, a couple of months ago, I stumbled on the printout of this puzzle at the bottom of a stack, and realized I could do a better job. Actually, I think I gagged. The second row, for example, consisted of ULNAE, ALAE, and CAEN. I managed to decrease the word count by two, work in snazzier long downs, and improve the overall fill. It's not perfect, but it's better.

I must be a glutton for punishment, because this is my third Thursday in which I've used bendy or intersecting themers, which don't allow a great deal of flexibility. I'm thankful for Will and Joel giving me the opportunity to improve.

– puzzle by John Guzzetta

"Sometimes an idea will wait 20 years to be a puzzle."
- Merl Reagle

I dedicate today's puzzle to the late, legendary puzzle master Merl Reagle. This theme was first attempted and submitted as "IS TOO!" to the Times six years back, filled with phrases + the "is" sound. After getting rejected for some shaky theme answers, I kept it around in my hopper over the years, surviving a handful of theme redesigns. This year I landed on a riff on the back-and-forth argument: IS NOT! vs. IS TOO! Sometimes a theme needs some time to percolate before it finds its legs.

Merl Reagle carried around a notepad for brainstorming ideas, always ready for when inspiration strikes. I mostly use my phone to keep track of puzzle concepts. I imagine all of us crossword constructors have our own favorite place we keep our brewing themes, waiting for their chance.

I'm sad that Merl didn't have the chance to flesh out all of the fun and clever theme contenders that lined his notepad. But I'm grateful for all the genius he got to share with us. His wrangling of the English language was unrivaled, and I'll personally miss his raw creativity and witty voice in crosswords.

Thanks, Merl!

– puzzle by Jeremy Newton

Inspiration can strike anywhere. I was in the parking lot at Save-On-Foods when I noticed something different about the 1973 quarter I was using for the shopping cart. During that year, to commemorate the centenary of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the reindeer on the reverse side had been replaced by a horse and rider. Naturally I thought of QUARTER HORSES and the idea of a numismatic theme started to form.

Had I done my research I might have discovered Sherry Blackard's puzzle of Monday, August 13, 2001 and that would have been the end of it. As it was I went ahead and came up with three possible theme entries, but I knew that wouldn't be enough to impress the editors. Then the penny dropped: I found that THREE CENT PIECES would conveniently pass through my three theme entries. I had struck crossword gold! Well, silver actually. Anyway, that's what sold the puzzle, and that buys a cartload of groceries.

The three cent coin was proposed in 1851 mostly as a result of the reduction in postage rates from five to three cents. Over 74 million coins, silver at first then nickel, were minted from 1851 to 1889. The silver coins issued from 1854 to 1873 at 3/4 of a gram (about 1/38 of an ounce) were the lightest weight coins ever minted by the United States.

My first submission had no less than fifteen entries "that would make for unenjoyable solving," but the third attempt was right on the money. Of the published crossword, only 19 clues were totally rewritten by the editors while 18 were my originals. Each of the other 39 underwent a minor edit: small change, to coin a phrase.

– puzzle by Mike Buckley

I constructed this puzzle in March 2014, during my junior year of high school. Wait a second, what's high school? Oh yeah, that's so last year! Now that Stanford has started up, everything else has faded into a blur. Even though I've only had a week of classes, I can see that college is going to be much more time- and homework-intensive than high school was. I'm not sure how all my crossword activities are going to fit in with college, but I'll definitely make time to submit puzzles every once in a while!

My seed entries for this puzzle were PLAYBOY MANSION and TOPLESS DANCERS, which seems kind of weird now that there are girls living in close proximity . . . oh well, YOLO! I still think that symmetrical pair is pretty awesome, even though I'm obviously much more mature now that I'm in college ;).

And I was especially thrilled to be able to incorporate two of my nine-letter seed entries, AIR HOCKEY and GENIUS BAR, in the neighboring stacks. Speaking of AIR HOCKEY, my dorm doesn't have it for some reason, which is really frustrating! We have ping-pong and pool tables, but I personally prefer air hockey to both of these. Well, I guess I'll have to appeal to dorm gov at some point — alas, the struggle of being a college student!

Anyway, my other favorite entries were HIPHOP, METH LABS, HELLION, OOH-LA-LA, and BITCOIN. I wasn't thrilled with LASER PEN (which doesn't sound as good to my ear as LASER POINTER), EDH, or RATA (mainly because of its position as the first across entry), but these three entries seemed like smallish tradeoffs, and I was certainly satisfied enough to proceed to the cluing.

Well, not quite! Before I clue a puzzle, I always check to make sure there aren't any dupes, which is a nerve-wracking process. My heart sunk when I noticed BAR at 35-Across, which was much too similar to GENIUS BAR. Fortunately, I noticed that the letter at 35-Across/29-Down could also be an S. SAR is kinda meh, but at least I was able to spice up the OSAMA clue!

Well, that's about all I have to say. Time to get back to tearing it up at frat parties . . . er, I mean getting ahead on my computer science and math assignments due next week! In any case, happy solving!

– puzzle by David Steinberg

I became interested in crossword puzzles fairly late in life. When your debut publication occurs in your early sixties, you aren't going to break any records in that area. Still, I have certain goals in mind that would give me great satisfaction to achieve.

This is my second crossword puzzle in The New York Times. This puzzle underwent several revisions. I will remember it as one for which persistence paid off.

The first version of this puzzle was constructed in the summer of 2013, when I had little experience with sub-72-word grids. It was rejected, but MAHJONGG, OKEY-DOKEY and WINGDINGS got a thumbs-up. I decided to re-work the grid, retaining these long answers (except that WINGDINGS became RINGDINGS). My aim was to create a smoothness that the original version lacked.

I re-submitted at the end of 2013 and was pleasantly surprised when Will expressed interest in the crossword. He requested that several short answers be replaced, which required revision to the SW and NE quadrants. A final revision of the NE quadrant was needed to remove an obscurity that I introduced in the previous revision. The crossword was accepted for publication in the spring of 2014.

I'm pleased with how this puzzle turned out. Having said that, today, with one more year of puzzle constructing experience, I would do the final revision differently.

My favorite clues in this puzzle are 24A: "Unpleasant surprise from a worker" (STING), and 3D: "Black Friday event?" (MAD DASH). I can take credit for the latter only.

I would like to thank Will and Joel for their fine work on this puzzle. Two tweaks got rid of an answer that was awkward to clue, and had a more subtle benefit as well. Their clues greatly improved the puzzle, in particular, the clever handling of a boo-boo, and the dialing of the difficulty level to "eleven."

– puzzle by Roland Huget

When Will approached me with his "never been done" scheme, it seemed the perfect opportunity to do something I've long wanted to do — create a daily NYT puzzle with illustrated clues. (I created an illustrated Sunday puzzle in 2004.)

I latched onto a spoonerism angle to bring something a bit different to the mix, but I didn't want to regurgitate someone else's creation. So I started mulling phrases. At some point I turned to two-syllable words that might be spoonerizable, beginning randomly with bucket and ticket … then pocket. A theme ensued. Googling "rocket full of pie" afterward, I found only a few unique hits, one being a children's short story by Joan Aiken in 1955.

Will originally asked me for a Mon-Wed. When I ran the basics by him, he asked if it could be done up as a Monday. Since I'd set up the grid to allow a fair amount of flexibility, and Monday seemed like just the place for a puzzle with cartoons, I quickly said yes.

The central answer could have been done Schrödinger-like, so that the crossing answers would fit their clues no matter which phrase was entered. But Will felt that wouldn't be Monday-worthy, and I agree. Better to keep it simple. Plus, it would have made for more constrained fill (I know because I tried).

– puzzle by Patrick Merrell

The basic idea for this puzzle came from a wordplay list I'd compiled much earlier: two-word phrases where the words were the same length and only differed by a few letters. (Actually, the original list was a little broader—it included phrases of three or more words that broke into equal pieces, like WARREN G / HARDING and THICK AS / THIEVES.) I compile a lot of lists like this, usually without knowing exactly what I'm going to do with them. In many cases, seeing the finished list helps me decide.

In this case, I finished compiling the list and didn't do anything with it. (I'm easily distracted sometimes.) Then Will asked me to make a puzzle for this twisty theme week, and I dug the list out of mothballs to see if I could get a 15x15 out of it. Overlapping the two parts and turning the nonmatching letters into two-letter rebus squares seemed like an interesting way to render the entries. For extra consistency, I limited myself to two-word entries of length 7. I also decided to nix entries with only one rebus square (like CULTURE VULTURE) or a hyphen between the words (like TRACTOR-TRAILER). My grid ended up slightly exceeding the usual black-square and word-count maximums, but I'd managed to sandwich in six theme entries, which seemed like an acceptable trade-off.

– puzzle by Patrick Berry

So thrilled to be a part of this great week of puzzles! This theme actually came out of another special week idea Will and I were considering where every theme would be centered around a different game. Given the unusual nature of the seven unchecked letters, we figured we could repurpose it for this week instead.

The theme was tricky to create because I wanted each of the questions to take a different form. It wouldn't have been much fun if they had all been IS THERE A (blank). Coming up with five idiomatic ways to take a guess in Hangman required some verbal gymnastics, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. It also took some thought as to how to clue these — I think the response-as-clue gimmick I settled on sort of piques the solver's interest, like "What the heck could that mean?"

Overall, I hope everyone's enjoying "Do Something Crazy Week," as it's being called internally. There are some excellent puzzles to come.

– puzzle by Joel Fagliano

I submitted this puzzle about a year and half ago, and fortunately it ended up fitting into this special week. I tend to like the rebus puzzles that have a reason for the rebus squares to exist, and creating dense shapes in the grid with rebus squares was something I hadn't seen before. A spiral seemed like a visually interesting choice that contrasted with typical crossword symmetry, and it would require a rebus density that was much higher than usual.

The original submission didn't shade the rebus squares, only the black squares that were part of the spiral's path, with a note telling the solver to look for a shape indicated by the theme entries. I slightly doubted that the puzzle was solvable that way because the gimmick is so unexpected, but I just figured Will would make it easier if he thought the same. I think moving the puzzle from its original Saturday spot to a Thursday, and shading the spiral, makes it tractable. Hopefully there's still a challenge in figuring out the theme and that the disruption in pattern matching makes for a unique solving experience. (I'm not afraid that the puzzle is too easy because a test solver already let me know that it was "sadistic." My goal isn't sadism, it's merely to provide a challenge!)

It seemed necessary to include theme entries representing spiral shapes, and I chose ones that spanned a variety of physical scales, as well ones manmade versus found in nature. Unusually, the theme entries are symmetric but their lengths are not, due to the spiral shape. Overall, there were dozens of partially filled grids before arriving at this final result.

– puzzle by Kevin G. Der

There have been a few recent puzzles with blanks as part of the solution. David Kwong's DRACULA. Jim Hilger's "Breaks." Even Miss Trunchbull — I mean, Jeff Chen (and his wife) — had SPACE BAR. Those were all great.

This basis for this idea actually came from a much older one: Manny Nosowsky's 2000 April Fools' Day puzzle, whose entire perimeter consisted of the letter T. Looking at that grid, I tried to come up with other tricky ways a perimeter might be utilized.

What about literal spaces, or blanks? BLANKS has lots of meanings, both as a noun and a verb. Better yet, it could be also clued as a proper. When the phrase OUTER SPACE, a fitting revealer, sprang to mind, I hoped I was onto something. Usually I'm not.

The best part about making this was generating a list of 13s and seeing what would interlock. That was loads of fun, because there was a huge reservoir to draw from. An earlier draft's successful interlock had "hard" science fiction entries like EVENT HORIZONS and GAMMA RAY BURSTS, but those were pretty literal, and not at all receptive to playful cluing. These four entries were the most colorful and varied set.

Some of my favorite new clues are those for LUNAR ECLIPSES, AD LIB and SLOGAN. Among the originals, I like CONSTELLATION, DOO-WOP, TENANT, ALI and ALIEN INVASION. It's cool that the Scrabble clue for BLANKS remains in a 6-letter slot, hinting at ?-TILES or a written-in BLANKS. ASSIZES is a word I learned on my first day of Torts. Well, my first day, and everyone else's second. Oops. Elle Woods I was not.

The five other puzzles this week have been fantastic. I'm thrilled, and very lucky, to have been included along with them.

– puzzle by Timothy Polin

Vic: Bruce and I have collaborated off and on for many years, starting back when he and Stella Zawistowski (then Daily) were a prolific team.

Bruce: That's right. And continuing on through the period that Vic and Bonnie Gentry were doing great work together. Every so often, we just think of something we'd both like. We've maybe done about 50 so far. So, late last year I sent Vic a grid with a theme inserted that I thought he'd go for. I like the challenge of interlocking theme entries, and I knew that Vic did, too. I already had it filled, but knew that Vic might very well improve on it.

Vic: That's right. Bruce had done a fill, and I tweaked it some, And then he tweaked my tweaking. But the grid, the theme, and the fill was excellent from the get-go, as always. You want to see some fine Venzke grid work, look at the 1/28/2007 Sunday Times puzzle, "Having Pull," and a 2007 Schrödinger we did for Simon & Schuster called "You Be the Judge" — I forget which volume it's in.

Bruce: Vic is far too generous in his compliments regarding my contribution. Especially on that Schrödinger—Vic had a great gimmick on that one. On this current puzzle, yes, I did the grid, but a puzzle — especially a NYT puzzle — without good clues is like a two-legged stool. And I enjoy consulting with Vic on clueing puzzles like this one. He recommended we clue it to a Tuesday, I think ...

Vic: Maybe even a Wednesday?

Bruce: ... and took the lead by drafting a first set of clues.

Vic: Which Bruce tweaked.

Bruce: I doubt if I changed diddly squat. Maybe three! Anyway, Will liked the puzzle and accepted it as a Monday, which he said would get it into print within a year. So, Vic wrote another set of "Monday clues" ...

Vic: And I sent those first to Bruce, and he tweaked ‘em ...

Bruce: This time I changed two!

Vic: ... and I sent ‘em to Will. And, true to form, it looks as though Will may have used a third of them or so.

Bruce: The long and short of it is that we are always glad to be on the right side of a New York Times byline.

Vic: Right, Bruce!

– puzzle by Bruce Venzke and Victor Fleming

MARY LOU: I happened on this Publilius Syrus adage while researching online. I find it very apropos today not only for what we say but especially for what we write online. I saw that it broke nicely into an 8/13/13/8 split and had the potential for a word ladder leading from FOOL to SAGE.

My original submission in December 2013 had a seven step word ladder. I heard from Anna Shechtman in April 2014 that Will liked the theme "which combines a quote and word ladder in a novel way. With that much theme material, though, it may not be possible to get completely clean fill." My additional attempts met with a reluctant no from Will, who added that if I could rework the grid with cleaner fill I could resubmit only my one favorite version. I contacted grid guru, Jeff Chen, at this point. Within a day's time he saw the possibility of adding an extra rung to the word ladder and came up with two versions he sent me, noting that the asymmetry of the original submission bugged him.

We both liked the same version. Jeff was a little hesitant to use the entry GRU but I convinced him that GRU along with ZAMBONI were the way to go. We received an acceptance from Will in May 2014. He noted that "GRU was new to me, but I think I'll go with it. It's more interesting than the best alternative I could see, GOA."

My thanks to Will, Anna and Joel for accepting and editing this puzzle. I hope you enjoyed solving it.

– puzzle by Mary Lou Guizzo and Jeff Chen

Imagine for one moment that it's finally spring in your neck of the woods. The sun is shining and life is good. You're driving in your car, windows down, music blaring, when suddenly ... WHAM! You drive into an axle-busting, teeth-jarring pothole that snaps you out of your reverie and back to reality. Such was the inspiration this past spring for today's puzzle and my crossword interpretation of driving into a pothole — with C-A-R dropping down one block on the "A" (into an imagined pothole of sorts) and then coming back up to the row it was originally on.

Two options I considered while constructing the grid were to have C-A-R spelled as R-A-C, as though the car was traveling forward in the phrase from left to right, or to have the letters C-A-R span two words. However, I finally decided that the theme would be too difficult to suss out so I used two-word phrases that contained the word CAR in either the first or second word of the phrase.

Lastly, I found a fun tidbit of info while I was cluing. The inclusion of former New York Senator, Al D'Amato, at 16-Across was totally by coincidence, not knowing that his nickname was "Senator Pothole" while he was in office!

– puzzle by Tracy Gray

I'm a fan of themeless grids that make use of the staircase pattern in the middle, with multiple five-letter words crossing one another. It's a good feeling when every one of those words in the middle comes out cleanly and, as a side benefit, this grid pattern often helps me keep the three-letter word count low.

My original submission looked like this, with the changed letters highlighted. At 53-Across, Keyser SOZE is the villain from "The Usual Suspects." At 11-Across, there's the former NBA guard Craig EHLO, a Cavaliers' fan favorite who guarded Michael Jordan when he hit "The Shot" in 1989 — maybe not the most well-known name if you're not a hardcore NBA fan like I am. They fit PELS in at 14-Down in the final puzzle; the fan in me approves.

So, Will and Joel changed 15 letters changed from the original submission, but I'm especially glad they agreed to leave F-BOMB untouched. I know Will once nixed that word from a previous puzzle, and it would have been a very, very easy change in this grid to A-BOMB. Hey, F-BOMB has been in the NYT itself, so I guess it's fair game.

– puzzle by Evan Birnholz

I'm pleased to make a comeback after a single, rather controversial outing a few years ago. I soon realized that cutting your teeth on themeless puzzles is probably the most intensive way of getting better at construction in general. A phrase like VANITY PRESS is ideal to me, because 1) it's a new entry for a Times puzzle, 2) it has so much personality, and 3) it's decipherable as a phrase even without prior knowledge, meaning it passes my "learnable moment" test. As a musician who currently finds himself at a highly academic institution, I love it.

Jacques LACAN may seem obscure, but he is UBER-big in academia (I originally had "'Hysteric's Discourse' psychoanalyst" hoping some solvers would lay down FREUD). KICK ME SIGNS are ... also big in academic settings? (Although, honestly, more cultural trope than reality? Tell me, world!) NIQAB and ARAB conversing with each another at the top is nice, though I hope implication of any sort of one-to-one between them has been avoided.

My non-reliance on any sort of autofill — does that qualify these puzzles as "artisanal"? — has taught me to think creatively about longer entries. ADULT SITES and BLANK CDS came about this way — it is always my hope that the quality of the seed entries and non-seed entries are near to each other enough that it becomes hard to tell which came first.

Thanks to Will and Joel for most of the clues and for a mild redo of the SE corner. The isolation there isn't ideal, but opening it up a bit would have meant undoing the central weave. I'm happy to see Will stuck more or less to the flavor of my original clues for 1D and 34A. My clue for 21D (BEDTIME STORY) was originally "Its end is rarely reached," but the published one is more on point. The transformation of 27D (CHESS) is just hilarious: my original clue was "Speed ___."

– puzzle by Andrew Zhou

I live in San Diego, but I've always felt that San Francisco is the most interesting city west of the Mississippi. I wouldn't call myself a liberal but you have to be impressed with San Francisco's role in the hippie counterculture, the sexual revolution, the anti-Vietnam-war peace movement, and the gay rights movement. It was certainly fortuitous that CITY BY THE BAY exactly matches SAN FRANCISCO, and the two biggest tourist attractions match also.

I knew the puzzle had to have the bridge, so I worked out a suspension to the 15x16 size. I spent quite a bit of time trying to design some grid art that looked like a bridge, but that proved to be more difficult than dogs, fish, and birds. I considered trying to work Haight-Ashbury in there somewhere, but my heart wasn't in it.

Hope you enjoyed the puzzle!

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

One way to understand what goes into constructing a NYT-worthy puzzle is to follow this email thread (which has been considerably edited and shortened.)

Hi Jay,

Joel Fagliano, writing on behalf of Will.

Thanks for showing us your FOOD COURT 15x. Will worries about running a puzzle with BATTERED CHICKEN, as a pun on domestic abuse isn't likely to amuse many people.

Hi Will,

What If we rebuilt the puzzle using GRILLED PORK CHOP instead?

Hi Jay,

GRILLED PORK CHOP feels inconsistent, because the other entries all have to do with the offense committed (corruption, divorce, etc), whereas this only refers to what happens once the PORK CHOP enters the courtroom (what a weird sentence to write!). Anyway, we still like the core idea here.

Hi Will and Joel,

We worked hard to come up with a replacement to GRILLED PORK CHOP. Below are 3 options.

17-A Rolled tortillas prosecuted for being high? BAKED ENCHILADAS

17-A Fungi involved in a wrongful termination suit? CANNED MUSHROOMS

17-A Game fish suing for slander? BLACKENED SALMON

Hi guys,

Thanks for the reworked theme proposal.

None of your proposed new theme entries sounded terribly familiar. What if, instead, the theme consisted of the following:

BAKED BEANS (10)

CANNED CORN (10)

Hi Will,

We rebuilt FOODCOURT using the theme entries you proposed.

Hi Jay,

Thanks for the new version. While the grid doesn't have anything that's actually bad, it also doesn't have anything actually good — and overall it feels awfully crosswordy. Would you be willing to try this again with a little more oomph?

Hi Will,

Thanks for hanging in there with us. Have a look at this next draft.

Hi Jay,

Yes, much better! Clue this up for a Wednesday, and we'll be all set.

Thanks a lot.

--Will

– puzzle by Jay Kaskel and Daniel Kantor