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This was really just an excuse to get BIGSPOON in a puzzle. With that in at 1A, I decided to shoot for big, open northwest and southeast corners while keeping the number of 3 and 4 word answers to a minimum. So here's a short list of the things I liked about the puzzle while I was constructing it.

1. The presence of HAHAHA and DADADA in the same corner, the latter of which was made pseudo-famous in the late nineties by a Volkswagen ad.
2. The Gashlycrumb TINIES are a delightfully morbid piece by the always great Edward Gorey.
3. Coming up with STRESS EATS saved me from having to completely tear up the northwest after I was most of the way through constructing it.
4. CELIAC Disease sufferers represent! We should form a club where we lament the lack of good gluten free pizza.
5. The non-forced dupe clue at 5D and 6D.

I was happy to see many of my favorite clues survive the cut, and particularly enjoyed some of Will's additions in the southwest. Also, the timing of this puzzle's publication couldn't have been better, as my wife just 41D'ed a baby while her family was on 47A for a wedding, so they're surrounded by 16A while we're surrounded by, well, 5D. I hope you enjoyed the puzzle!

– puzzle by David Woolf

This puzzle is my sixth publication in the New York Times. The initial version of the grid was completed some three years ago, but it was a deficient draft to say the least. The puzzle sat dormant for a few years before I resurrected it from my crossword puzzle wasteland and performed some reconstructive surgery on it. The operation was a success. With eight theme entries, it is the first puzzle of mine Will has accepted without the need for further editing on my part.

"Bear Down, Arizona!" ARIZONAWILDCATS served as my seed entry and a form of homage to Tucson, where I met and married my wife. Our first date was a Wildcats basketball game during their NCAA championship season. Initially, I considered constructing a themeless puzzle, but the A & W theme emerged quite readily so I ran with it.

ABIGAILWILLIAMS made for a solid, 15-letter, vertical anchor in the center of the grid. Discovering a home for APPIANWAY and ALTARWINE as symmetrical crossings was serendipitous and somewhat of a coup. At that point, I knew I was on to something (OK NOW!). ACIDWASH and AIRWAVES worked nicely for the northeast and southwest corners, making for five theme entries crossing the central down entry. Finally, I placed ADWAR to offset the reveal, AANDW, as a bonus entry and clincher in opposite corners.

– puzzle by Michael Dewey

This puzzle began life as a joke. I asked a friend, have you heard about the movie sequel about the greatest mohel in Brooklyn? Anyone who knew what a mohel is has gotten a LOL moment at the answer: AMERICAN SNIPPER. (For those of you who don't know, a mohel is the person who performs the Jewish rite of circumcision.) It's such a simple, concise little gem that, when I realized it was a great puzzle idea as well, it seemed like it would be a snap to sit down for a few minutes and come up with some more theme movies.

Ha! chalk that one up to rosy-cheeked optimism. It seems that the universe of words that form new words with a doubled letter is not nearly so big as I would have thought. And that list shrinks considerably when you try to fit them into a set of movie titles that are both familiar enough to everyone and yet still make any kind of sense as a phrase. So Will rejected my first draft, but encouraged me to find some new theme entries to replace the ones he didn't care for. And that too required a pretty fair amount of research work, plus some serious back-and-forthing with Will before arriving at the final set. So a big vote of thanks here to IMDB.com for a wealth of keyword titles to sift through, and to Will and his assistant Joel, both for their input and even more so for their patience.

BTW, this is a good thing to know for any of you puzzle writers who are struggling with rejection slips: getting a Times quality crossword can take a large amount of work and perseverance. So don't give up!

Finally, I am personally quite pleased with working both a GIANT SQUID and a JOLTIN JOE into the grid. It seems to me that the giant squid is an eminently worthy animal for the puzzle pantheon. And as for JOLTIN JOE, hey, come on, he's the Yankee Clipper, and I love the Yankees, even though we came up a little short this year!

– puzzle by Michael Ashley

Doug: Sam came up with the theme concept and a great entry in DIRTY CHERRY, but we couldn't find another 11-letter theme entry to pair with it. CHEVYWEIGHT was a possibility, but we felt it had a couple of strikes against it.

Sam: One problem, we felt, was that some solvers would give CHEVY the soft, "sh" sound instead of the hard, "ch" sound, even if we clued CHEVY with reference to Chevy Chase instead of the car make. The bigger strike, though, was that it was the only one-word theme entry.

Doug: We considered putting DIRTY CHERRY in the center of the grid, but when I tried squeezing in that 5th theme entry, the fill got fugly. Would it have been worth it? My grids usually end up on the "less theme, better fill" end of the spectrum. Thinking back to my wasted youth in front of the TV, I can envision two groups facing off in the bar at the Stamford Marriott: "More theme!" "Better filling!" "More Theme!" "Better Filling!"

Sam: This is one reason (among many) why I like working with Doug. I probably would have ended up in the "More theme!" camp, but the acceptance email from Will and Joel specifically mentioned that they liked the fill. And what's not like to like with SHAMWOW and...is that, is that HAIR GEL? Doug's craftsmanship with the grid is likely what sold this puzzle.

– puzzle by Samuel A. Donaldson and Doug Peterson

Will mentioned earlier this year that he was running low on easy, smooth Monday puzzles, so I thought I'd write one. LIKE synonyms camouflaged in phrases felt like a simple enough idea ... and wouldn't LIKE MINDED make a great revealer!

Monday puzzles sometimes bore me, though, so I wanted to do something more interesting with this one. What if I added more elements — instead of four themers, how about five? Good, but the set I found meant that three synonyms would be at ends of phrases and two at beginnings. That felt inelegant.

Hey, how about using mirror symmetry to put all the key words in the middle of the puzzle? That fortuitously worked out, and then while I was building the grid, I thought it would be fun to make it a wide-open grid, with themeless-like corners. Some testing showed I could do it without resorting to much crossword glue, so I figured it could make for a more an interesting solve.

Sometimes I ought to listen to my own advice, though. As a constructor, I really enjoyed putting this grid together, what with entries like OR NURSE (nurse specializing in operating room work), DOORMEN, HOT DATE, FORGERS, IM COOL, GAL PAL, etc. And STIPPLE is such an interesting word.

But I presented Will a dilemma — with a Monday-like theme and a themeless-like grid, what day of the week should it run on? If a Monday, would a novice solver know what STIPPLE means (much less understand a clever clue for it)? And would someone who doesn't do that many crosswords appreciate the bizarre looking ORNURSE string of letters, or get completely confused?

So there you have it, my easy-breezy Monday puzzle … running on a Wednesday.

It really is a wonder that anyone ever listens to me.

– puzzle by Jeff Chen

This one was a lot of fun to make! I'd thought AINT I A WOMAN would make a nice entry ever since Finn Vigeland, the JASA Crossword Class, and I had a puzzle rejected because (among other probably reasonable reasons) it had (to the editors unfamiliar) BELL HOOKS in it. (!??@?@??!?!!?!?!?!#?@?@?!@?!@?@#? <- verbatim quote from me after hearing the news. Also verbatim: "But it's an inferably-spelled name! Bell! Hooks! LIKE THE THINGS ON WHICH YOU HANG YOUR BELLS.) Robbed of seeing her name in all caps in the solution, I mentioned her work in the clue for AINT I, hoping for another rare starts-off-lowercase crossword clue. No dice.

A lot of wordplay-driven clues in this one, and Will and Joel (and Frank?) did a lovely job smoothing my excesses when I leaned a little ungrammatical (I had "Play hard to get?" for IN-JOKE before they realized English syntax is a virtue before G-d). Most of the clues are mine, though I went, originally, heavier on the pop culture — besides bell, no more references to Pynchon (YEOMEN), Vonnegut (his SAN Lorenzo), or DAS Racist. My roomie tells me his dad would have hated those clues, so hopefully this was all worth it.

Very happy to get TRANSGENDER into a puzzle, and with a hopefully inoffensive clue — not always guaranteed these days. Crosswords are our own little sandbox of linguistic import; that word hadn't appeared in a puzzle before, though I hope to see it again and again.

– puzzle by Natan Last

The best "What do these seemingly disparate things have in common?" puzzles are those in which you don't know the answer to this question until you hit the revealer. That's what I was trying for here — a legitimate, honest "a-ha" moment. This can be difficult to achieve with a Monday-level puzzle, so if I pulled it off, kudos to me! If I didn't, well, no kudos, I guess. I'll somehow have to make it through the day kudos-less.

Other than that, I tried to pack in interesting entries while minimizing the glue, as always. I'm mostly happy with how things came out in this regard. The only entry I really don't like is C-SPOT, because I've never seen it or heard it used in "the wild" (and Google thinks it's something very different than money). But it *is* in the dictionary, so fair game, I suppose.

I do like some of the longer non-theme entries, like OK CORRAL, PAGE BOY, and LUCKY ME. I was also happy to facilitate the debut of the hilarious ILANA Glazer in the NYT puzzle. The equally funny (maybe even a bit funnier) ABBI Jacobson probably isn't far behind. Those two can crack me up like few other. Do you think YAS QUEEN will ever be an entry in a mainstream puzzle?

By the way, if you are interested in more in depth constructor notes, feel free to check out my word blog.

– puzzle by Damon Gulczynski

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!

– puzzle by Tom Pepper

This is an unusual grid. As you can see, it has a set of quad-stacked 15s running through the center of the grid, and a pair of triple-stacked 15s at the top and the bottom. When I first started constructing this crossword, I did not have this goal in mind. This is because all of my quadstack puzzles have been constructed "backwards." By "backwards" I mean that I start by trying to create a set of four 15-letter words to stack independently of the grid.

But, how are the actual quad-sack sets constructed? The answer is: by any means possible!

Some solvers think it's 100% computer and word list management. However, in reality, using a computer to "brute force" a quad-stack is often doomed to failure. It is possible, but the results are usually very poor, because the computer word list has to be very, very large. And that means: lots of unusual, really poor, rare words. Furthermore it's a good way to fry your hard-drive! (I speak from experience!)

The best approach I've found, is a combination of old-fashioned hand constructing, with varying degrees of computer assistance.

When I think I have what may be a viable stack, usually with at least a couple of nonsensical 4-letter combinations crossing the stacks, I set to work trying to design a possible grid (if I'm lucky) around the stacks. Frequently I do this on my iPhone. Indeed, some of today's puzzle was actually completed in the parking lot of a local late-night donut shop ... and heck, I got free police protection too ;)

Seriously though, as I said, these puzzle are a combination of computer assistance, hand construction and sheer luck. And in the case of this puzzle, it was sheer luck that gave me the possibility of adding the extra stacks.

However, if I had not found two strong 10-letter words (CHILD BIRTH and TORE TO BITS) to join the stacks, Will Shortz would not have accepted this puzzle. Those two long words meant that Will was willing to break his moratorium on this style of grid, mainly because there was greater interconnectivity between the stacked parts of the grid.

Personally, I still think the puzzle (obviously) would be improved by a less segmented grid. But, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a 3/4/3 stack pattern has ever been published. So if some solvers think that this is too much of a "stunt" grid: I plead guilty. But I do hope this is still interesting and entertaining to solvers.

– puzzle by Martin Ashwood-Smith

ELLEN: Ohhh this puzzle was a bear! It started off last July with the phrase JUMP THE GUN. I wondered if we could somehow make an entry "jump" over another entry. We tried several variations from shaded squares to stair-steps to vertical entries. Nothing seemed to work. In order to fit everything in cleanly, we needed a much larger grid. I think we even tried to toss the whole idea in the trash a time or two along the way. Jeff ultimately came up with this iteration. It's a variation on puzzles with stacked theme entries, but I like the clever way these entries relate to each other.

In the end, it took us almost 100 emails and 40 versions of the grid before we had something to submit. I appreciate Jeff's approach to puzzle creation. Good ideas take time. Have a great Sunday!

JEFF: Tough grid to create. I swore off themes with stacked entries after my last one. What with each pair taking away so much flexibility, they're just irritatingly difficult to build a smooth, interesting grid around.

(Apparently I have a short memory. Or I'm not very smart. Probably both.)

As a solver, vivid bonus fill can help keep my attention through an entire Sunday puzzle. I do like some of the longer stuff we incorporated: DAD-BLASTED OPERACOATS, O CANADA, David/Amy SEDARIS, even TWOFER and GABFEST, but I aim to have at least ten really nice bonus entries strewn about a Sunday grid, so this didn't quite hit the mark. It's so tough to do when you have so much more theme material to incorporate than usual.

Answers like CATBOATS, SUSTAINS, STOREOWNER are fine, but they don't excite me much. There were (many) other options we looked at for every part of the grid, but this final product felt overall like the best trade-off between sparkly long fill and relatively smooth short stuff.

– puzzle by Ellen Leuschner and Jeff Chen

The initial spark was the thought of doing a puzzle with a large circle graphic — I tend to like puzzles that have something of visual interest in the design.

I realized early on that "mirror symmetry" would be the best option and also, if I wanted to have a long horizontal central themer, I would need a "cheater" square at each end, otherwise it was too difficult to mesh the long themer with the "round" (circle of shaded squares). Once the "round" had taken shape I began the search for circle themes. "THE RING OF FIRE" had potential but fires were mostly too negative! Eventually, it may have been the time of day that made me think about Happy Hour ;-), but at some point I thought "THE ROUND'S ON ME!" could be fun! It had the requisite 13 letters for the central themer and made for nice graphic word play too.

From there the types of bar drinks were fairly easy to list but many didn't yield acceptable fill. The other issue was with the top and bottom words in the "round" which are the only ones that were clued words (not formed like the others by diagonals) that could potentially prematurely give away the other themer words in the "round". RUM, at the top, and VODKA, at the bottom, for example, would have given it away pretty quickly. But GIN (also a card game) and STOUT (not just a drink) worked out to help conceal, from solvers, the thematic reveal words a little longer in the "round".

This was a fun puzzle to construct!

– puzzle by John E. Bennett

This being my very first published crossword puzzle, I'm quite pleased about seeing it in print. I started constructing a few years ago after solving more and more puzzles. Thought I'd try my hand being on the other side. I started from ground zero, even submitting a few puzzles that didn't follow the basic rules of construction. Not a good move, but they were so much easier to build when I could make up the rules as I went along.

The theme for this puzzle came to me in a bit of a flash. I was standing on a curb as a friend was pulling up in a car to pick me up. Fooling around, I stuck my leg out and pretended to hitch up my skirt so as to get a lift as a hitchhiker. Because I had been reading Patrick O'Brian novels about Captain Jack Aubrey and the Royal Navy, "show a leg" popped into my head because it is a phrase that frequently appeared in those books. Back in that time period, gentlemen "showed a leg" when they stuck out a stockinged leg and bowed by way of introduction. I was looking for crossword themes at the time so whenever some odd phrase popped into my head, I bounced it around for crossword angles and fell upon "show some leg" and theme answers that had leg parts in them. When I hit upon RIDGEMONTHIGH, it felt like I might have something good.

The editors seemed to like the idea right from the get go, though not the initial theme execution. I am green at this stuff, so their comments were very welcome and very helpful. After a fair amount of back and forth, I finally got something that seemed to work pretty well. I was instructed to build for a Monday puzzle and was surprised to see it coming out as a Wednesday.

– puzzle by Scott Yut

A few years ago, I wanted to make a puzzle where the solution involved leaving some squares blank. My original idea involved theme entries like "RUNNING ON [EMPTY]" and "[NOTHING] PERSONAL" where the Down answers only made sense if you left the bracketed words blank. But Will rejected a couple iterations of this, on the grounds that solvers wouldn't enjoy seeing a Down answer like "ASHG" (not knowing they were supposed to leave the G blank).

So the obvious next step was a puzzle where the Down answers worked as valid entries with OR without the letter from the intersecting theme entry, so solvers would see "BRAG" when the clue suggested BRA. I played with this a bit, but I eventually gave up on it — I couldn't "explain" the gimmick to my constructing software, and I was never much good at hand-filling.

Then, in 2013, my laptop got stolen and I didn't have a backup of my laboriously compiled crossword dictionary (may it rest in peace). I tried to start over, but I was back to square one — AARE and IS AT and INRI in every fill! I got discouraged, and stopped constructing ... until I graduated college last year, needed some supplemental income, and decided to get back in on that crossword cash.

I picked this "ghost" idea back up, since (lacking a good dictionary) I'd have to do some hand-filling anyway. I wrote a Python script to generate a list of answer pairs like HOLY LAND / HOLLAND to work with, and went from there. My submitted version didn't have the second half of the revealer clue (it was just "Riddled with ghosts") since I like the idea of a gimmick puzzle that has no indication anywhere that it's a gimmick puzzle — just clues and words. But I get that people would've had too much trouble without a revealer.

Some extra details for extreme crossword wonks: To fill this puzzle, I created a new dictionary with every possible answer pair encoded in a particular way. The pair BRA / BRAG, for instance, was included in the special dictionary as the word "BRAG1" — the numeral 1 after a letter indicates that that letter can be removed and still be an acceptable entry. Then I inputted the four theme answers as rebus squares, e.g. TOWNS as T1 O1 W1 N1 S1 (see here). This way, my filling software looked at "_ W1 _ _" and suggested words from the special dictionary: AW1OL (AWOL / AOL), GW1EN (GWEN / GEN), TW1IN (TWIN / TIN), etc. I still had to handpick entries where the longer answer stood on its own — without a clue — but this rebus trick was extremely helpful.

– puzzle by Milo Beckman

MARY LOU: I approached Jeff about another Halloween puzzle using ALL HALLOWS EVE as a seed entry. He came up with the crossing LORD VOLDEMORT and we were off. Jeff whipped out a few grid layout possibilities. We kicked ideas back and forth and proceeded on filling the grid once we agreed on the best design. If my memory serves me right, he came up with the entries LIFE HACK, EREADER and I WONT DO IT and I came up with LE FIGARO.

We did offer the possibility of linking the clue on the two seed entries, as ALL HALLOWS EVE was the night when LORD VOLDEMORT went on his murderous spree, killing Harry Potter's parents, Lily and James. I also liked the clue "Howl at the Moon, e.g." for PIANO BAR as I thought it in keeping with the holiday spirit, but these did not make the cut. I was pleased to see the connection between OYSTER and BAY retained. I have fond memories of trips to Long Island and visiting the former home of the Teddy Roosevelt family, Sagamore Hill, near the hamlet of OYSTER BAY.

As always, a pleasure and learning experience to work with Jeff. My appreciation to Will and Joel for accepting and editing this puzzle. I hope you enjoy your solving experince and the Halloween/ALL HALLOWS EVE holiday on October 31! Happy Howl-o-ween!

JEFF: After ML wrote me that ALL HALLOWS EVE would make for a fun Halloween mini-theme, we brainstormed on what might a good crossing answer. Scanning through my personal list, I couldn't help but stop at LORD VOLDEMORT, as I'm a huge Harry Potter fan. (The rumors that I run through parking lots at night with a broom between my legs, practicing my aim with quaffles, are completely false.)

(Mostly.)

And when ML found an article (this was back in 2015) entitled "Voldemort is polling better than many Republican presidential candidates," we knew we had to do it. Considering The Terminator, Darth Vader, and The Shark from Jaws was polling ahead every Republican candidate at the time, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named really should have thrown his hat into the ring.

We couldn't quite get the syntax perfect, but brainstorming our original clue for ARMPIT was awfully fun: [Worst city in a particular state, metaphorically]. (I tried to make a joke about Knockturn Alley being the ARMPIT of magical London, but no one laughed.)

– puzzle by Mary Lou Guizzo and Jeff Chen