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Out of nowhere, it popped into my head one day that [Holy cow] would make a suitable clue for ZOUNDS as well as ZEBU. Whether this kind of spontaneous realization is a sign of improving thematic awareness or an indication of deteriorating mental stability I'll leave for you readers to decide. The smart money's on the latter, since I'm not sure I was ever playing with a full deck to begin with. More like with a euchre deck, say.

Anyway, the hope that enough similar combos would constitute a decent theme led me to start searching for others. Discovering CURSES / BOWS was the crucial point of construction, as this puzzle, at least in its present form, might have proved impossible to build without it. In fact, if I hadn't found those symmetrical entries for the SE corner, I probably would have abandoned the effort altogether. ZOUNDS / ZEBU was just too nice of a combo, in my opinion, to contemplate making the puzzle without.

Will and Joel caught and fixed a subtle but dumb oversight of mine, replacing DARN with DAMN at 7a. DAMN *was* in that spot in earlier drafts, but I changed it to DARN for some unimportant reason, completely overlooking the resultant duplication. It was downright mortifying to think that I'd compromised the puzzle with something so easily corrected, all the more so considering that I'd noticed the mistake myself but hadn't yet submitted my own revision. But they did correct it, and relief washed over me in an awesome wave. So, GRAZIE MILLE, MERCI BEAUCOUP, MUCHAS GRACIAS.

Bonus points for identifying the movie paraphrased above. "Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?"

– puzzle by Timothy Polin

David:

Creating this puzzle was a Herculean effort. It began back in 2013 when I approached Kacey Walker with the question "Want to write a puzzle together?" We met through her husband shortly after I moved to San Diego, and I knew she would be game for trying something difficult. Given her interest in programming and Scrabble, we quickly settled on the theme: present solvers with a Scrabble rack and have them anagram the letters for the theme answers. The twist was that each rack would anagram in multiple ways — exactly 3, in fact — and so the puzzle would be a step up from the famous BOBDOLE/CLINTON puzzle of 1996, where the clue "Lead story in tomorrow's newspaper (!)" had not one, but two answers. We both loved the idea of taking these "Schrödinger puzzles" to the next level.

The challenges in this were immense: finding racks that had exactly three anagrams, making sure all three anagrams were well-known words, avoiding triplets that had three different letters in the same spot (creating a triplet in the crossing that would get but a single clue), figuring out a black-square arrangement that would accommodate all this insanity, filling the crosses and writing clues that didn't feel forced, making sure the grid was clean, and on and on. Our initial effort had four of these Scrabble racks built around a center black square (see right). Can you see the three words in each septet?

This grid was ultimately rejected — words like RSA were too obscure, and a few of the clues were too forced and couldn't be fixed. Getting that rejection was hard. The two of us put in a tremendous amount of time on this version: Kacey wrote a program that searched for the well-known triplets; we argued over which to select; I went through endless drafts of the black square placement; and we spent months trying to fill, clean up, clue, edit, and re-clue the beast. For me, the neatest aspect of the final grid was that it had 81 different possible solutions (how would Will even print the solution?!), depending on what anagram choice a person made for each of the four Scrabble racks.

After the rejection, we decided that using four theme answers was simply too much. It hamstrung the grid in powerful ways, and led to substandard fill. When we moved down to three we had more freedom, and this allowed us to include SCRABBLE and ANAGRAMS as theme answers. It also resulted in a non-standard black-square placement, which I think is fun, especially for long-time solvers who constantly see the same old grids.

In the final version shown to the left, Kacey was responsible for all the words starting at the central I, moving northeast, then around the corner and to the western edge. I did the other half: from the I to the southwest and then east. The clues were also split — Kacey did the Downs, I did the Acrosses — and we talked about all the clues that had to represent multiple words, like W/RAIL and N/ROTARY.

The rejection of the original version was also fortuitous. Between the creation of the first and second versions, a new version of the Scrabble dictionary was announced. Any new words would be legal in tournament play starting on December 1, 2014. Could we get the new grid constructed in time to celebrate this changing of the lexical guard (yes!)? Were any of our anagram triplets really quadruplets because of the new words (no!!)? Would Will be interested in celebrating the new dictionary with a Scrabble-themed puzzle (yes!!!)?

Kacey and I hope you enjoy this labor of love. It is her first puzzle, and sets a high bar for any future constructions. As for me, I think this is my favorite puzzle of any I have constructed.

– puzzle by Kacey Walker and David Quarfoot

I did this one the (sort-of) good old-fashioned way — by hand. I say "sort of" because I didn't quite use pencil and graph paper, but Microsoft Excel. I think I might have singlehandedly crashed onelook.com at one point during the construction process, if not worn out the "?" key on my keyboard. This had been one of the odder crossword goals of mine, to get a freestyle hand-constructed puzzle published. I'm glad I did it, because I have gained a completely new respect for those folks who did this before computers were a thing … and for the few of those who still don't use them. It's hard to keep away from crosswordese when doing it this way.

I'd be pointing out the obvious by saying that the whole thing started with 1-Across; when you're building these things manually, you really have to have a definitive seed answer at a definitive position. Happily, Will loved the answer I put there. It progressed (slowly) from NW to NE, through the center to the SW, and then to the SE.

As the hand-constructing process goes, the black square arrangement went through myriad changes to make this thing work; I wasn't even originally planning on having a grid-spanning entry in the middle, but it just kinda worked out that way after building the NE. The SE was the painstaking part — I had to do it twice. There was one particular entry (BADASS) that I thought may have been OK for the Times, but Will didn't quite feel the same way. (There were a few other iffy entries in that corner that pushed it over the edge, too.) So, true to form, I revised it the same way (it took another four weeks, on and off) until I got it into its final form.

(Shameless plug: I'm gonna be doing my own crosswordy thing at least once a week. It's like I've given myself my own playground now!)

– puzzle by Tim Croce

My love affair with robotics came on suddenly, like a transistor activating. I hadn't had much exposure to electronics during undergrad, so I was apprehensive when a friend of mine goaded me into taking a higher-level electromechanics class in grad school. It felt nearly impossible at first, but once I figured out how simple a transistor really was (it's basically a tiny electrical switch), the leaps toward building robots came one after another:

• Hooking up four transistors into an "H-bridge" configuration allows you to drive a motor backward and forward using low-voltage logic signals.
• Two or more motors give you a drive train.
• Building a chassis on top of a drive train is difficult, but it's more time-consuming than intellectually challenging.
• Once you have a chassis to mount apparatuses on, you can really make things interesting. Light sensors. Switches to detect contact. Solenoids and motors to move things …
• ... like WEAPONRY.

And from there, I became obsessed with robot combat. If "Pacific Rim" had been released back then, I would have marched directly to the local military branch office and demanded to be a Jaeger pilot. (Are you listening to my genius recruiting idea, armed forces?)

Our project first quarter was to build an autonomous robot to play "American Gladiators" — it first had to detect whether it was on offense or defense based on where it was placed in the arena. On offense, your objective was to pick up a foam cube and deposit it into a goal. On defense, you had to protect the goal. There could only be one winner — mano a mano, roboto a roboto. Once the whistle blew, the metal gloves came off. (My team ended in a three-way tie for first, thanks to some last-minute sensor tune-ups and a bit of luck.)

Oh right, there's a puzzle today. After laying everything out, I couldn't get around the fact that the SE corner required long fill and was highly constrained. At first, all I could work in was ROBOTLIKE, which I later realized sounded silly compared to ROBOTIC. Luckily, ROBOT SUMO 1.) fit in perfectly, making for a nice clean fill, and 2.) was okayed by Will, after I went on and on about what an incredible sport it was, not to mention how great it is in promoting technical education through amazing fun. Thanks to Will for putting up with my crazy interests!

(I thought long and hard about putting RORSCHACH in that ROBOT SUMO slot, but I was worried that people might have trouble with OPERON, which is a basic(ish) concept in biology / genetics but it's certainly not a layman's term. I didn't like the possibility of people ending up with OPERAN / RARSCHACH or OPERUN / RURSCHACH. Not very satisfying when that sort of thing happens.)

Now, back to work on my "Pacific Rim 2" script-in-progress. I'm pretty sure the robot sumo will win in the end, but you should never count out one of the original Titans. Taking all bets ...

– puzzle by Jeff Chen

Kevin:

I'm very lucky to be able to collaborate with Andrea and very pleased that we're having a Monday puzzle published together. Andrea is one of the most accomplished Monday constructors of all time. She's had 31 Monday puzzles published (now 32), which is the 6th most in the Shortz era. Plus she's fun to hang out with, she's friendly and nice to everybody, and she organizes lunches at restaurants in San Francisco for Bay Area constructors to get together!

We started on this puzzle in early 2013. I emailed Andrea with a long list of possibilities, and we narrowed them down as follows. We started with a long list of SAY possibilities. I was trying to find a SAY 10 to go with SUE GRAFTON, but Andrea decided early on that her favorite SAY answer was SAY HEY KID, so we decided to look for a SUE 9.

Eventually we figured out it didn't have to be SUE, it could be SOO or SIOUX, so we went with SIOUX CITY. I proposed SEE NO EVIL and SO FAR AWAY (clued as the Carole King song) early on, and we both liked both of those, so we stuck with those. We had some SIGH possibilities, but none we were crazy about, and several of them were even lengths. Eventually we figured out we could do SCI FI something, with SCI FI CONVENTION and SCI FI SHORT STORY both as good options that were length 15.

I find easy puzzles are hard to make and harder puzzles are easier to make, because the universe of fill answers you can use in an early week puzzle is relatively small, but the possibilities for a later week puzzle are much broader. For this puzzle, we went through at least a dozen versions of the grid before we found one that was clean and crisp enough to be Monday-worthy.

ACME:

I love collaborating with folks who are really excited and dedicated, like Kevin. It makes me feel like there is more of a community that goes beyond just an individual little puzzle. He had a nice idea based on my vowel-run "poems" that stretched it in fun ways. It was a true collaboration.

– puzzle by Kevin Christian and Andrea Carla Michaels

This puzzle went through a strange evolution. I submitted the initial draft (to right) in August 2013, but Will nixed it because he didn't think PASTAFARIAN would be a well-known enough term for Times solvers (naturally, I threw down that word in my very first Devil Cross puzzle). He said it was a close call, which I interpreted as, "Refill that part of the grid and try again." I went back to work, and after a few attempts to make a close switch with PASTA FAZOOL proved unsuccessful, I settled on another grid, which Will accepted in March 2014.

It was a pretty clean grid (see left), but a month ago I took another look and cringed that I left in a couple of not-so-great entries like OATER, MSEC, and PBA. Because I had some creaky fill in my last Times puzzle that I still wish I had excised, I decided to go back and give this one another revision.

The final version is about two-thirds different from the original acceptance, but I think it's the best one. I'm just glad Will agreed and ran it so soon afterwards. For me, being able to fit in one of the best bands ever and one of the best TV shows ever at 46- and 48-Across was icing on the cake.

Interestingly, I'm responsible for the last two instances of both AEROS and WILCO in the Times puzzle. Both times I submitted similar clues to refer to the old Houston-based A.H.L. team and the Chicago-based band. Both times Will instead chose clues to refer to a quaint term for airplanes and a radio reply. He may be trying to tell me something.

On another note: listen up, new crossword constructors! The five of us behind the Indie 500 crossword tournament are accepting submissions for a sixth tournament puzzle. The deadline is January 15.

Finally, happy birthday to my Dad, who got me into this whole puzzle thing.

– puzzle by Evan Birnholz

Ashton:

This was the first themeless James and I collaborated on, around two years ago now. Our ideas about what makes a themeless great were starting to evolve towards a more "holistic" view, for lack of a better word. In the era of computer-assisted construction, a scattershot collection of great entries isn't enough — it becomes harder and harder to tell what's human and what's machine.

Instead of making themelesses that are simply lists of words (and judging them by simply enumerating their "good" and "bad" words), we focused on trying to craft puzzles with interrelations and echoes and interesting juxtapositions in them, so they could only be fully appreciated by considering them whole. Hopefully this puzzle's NW corner has this effect (relating the two long downs and joining a triplet of entries with identical clues were two other attempts at achieving something similar). The end result isn't perfect, but we hope the solver can feel the human effort that went into it.

James:

What he said. Ashton did the top and I did the bottom. Hope you like it!

– puzzle by James Mulhern and Ashton Anderson

The idea for this puzzle came from out of the blue, as long as you define "out of the blue" as "Ian Livengood's 'Chee Whiz!' puzzle of 8/3/14." While solving that puzzle, adding CHEE sounds to different phrases, I thought, "Gee, wouldn't it be interesting to add a GEE sound to different phrases?" Where do I come up with this stuff?!

I immediately fell in love with the phrase NINTENDO OUIJA. But not everyone pronounces it WEE-JEE, so it might fail for some. I asked my fellow cruciverbalists and got mixed results. I decided to push forward and make a weekday-sized puzzle with it, until at the last minute, Amy Reynaldo hammered it into my head. I abandoned OUIJA and started thinking of other possibilities. That allowed me to get GPS I LOVE YOU and OH DARJEELING, two of my favorites, along with KITTY LITURGY and WEIRD ALGAE. I figured I'd have enough for a Sunday, which has been a goal since I started constructing. So, thank you, Amy, for helping me make a better product!

Will and Joel said that Add-A-Sound themes were becoming common, so what put this puzzle over the top were a couple of secondary goals that I set. I wanted each GEE sound to be spelled differently, and I wanted them spread out within their respective entries; two are at the beginning, two at the end, and three in the middle. One interesting change: GOD NO was originally OODLE [Website behind Facebook Marketplace]. Will's entry is definitely livelier, but it comes with PENTAD and PROEMS where I had CELLAR and DREAMS. (And MUNG was ANNO.) So, a tradeoff. No amount of fiddling with the grid produced any better result.

Most of my clues were changed a little bit or completely (64%), but I'll proudly claim the clues for NANU, NACL, TOENAIL, and STOOP. I wish my clue for OH DARJEELING had gotten through ["Abbey Road" song with the lyric, "I'll never steep you alone"?], but I understand why it had to go. And I liked [Never, on a Sonntag] for NIE and [Four-letter word, boringly] for TETRAGRAM. But I do like Will and Joel's clues for DRAGNET and AWOL.

I submitted this puzzle at the end of September, a mere 11 weeks ago! That's light-speed in the crosswording world. Will's Sunday supply is comparatively low, creating opportunities for us Sunday-hopefuls.

– puzzle by Jim Peredo

When I first submitted this grid to Will in March 2013 (see right), Paula let me know that most of the theme examples "feel contrived." Before I went to work on a new grid, I shared my guess that, among the themers, NOT UNATTRACTIVE was okay, and Will replied, "That's a fine example of litotes," so we were off and running.

I was expecting this to run on a Thursday. Hence, each theme answer was originally clued by its one-word, figure-of-speech. When Will decided to run it on a Wednesday, he took on the task of simplifying a lot of my clues including adding a hint to each of the theme clues, and as always, did a bang up job. Other examples: [Part of a bargain] for PLEA became [Subject of a court bargain], [Abba hit] for SOS became [Maritime alert], [Beans] for ZILCH became [Nada].

One of my favorite clues that I was both delighted and a little surprised to see make the final cut was 'Squash units' for SETS. I'm guessing Will has a soft spot for anything that's related to racquet sports.

Hope you enjoyed it.

– puzzle by Stu Ockman

Brad::

I had the stack in the SW and was struggling with the "J" in JOE CAMEL. Neither any 15s nor any 7s with J in that position spoke to me. Enter Doug, who really got us unstuck with O.J. TRIAL. Lots of the fresh stuff here you owe to him. Some of my favorite clues include the ones we had for TRIX, OFFAL, and NEC. It might be worth noting that 25A is a terrific scene from Don Carlo, my favorite Verdi piece and quite possibly my favorite opera, period.

Doug:

Why would anyone want a JOE CAMEL shower curtain? And yet, back in the heyday of Joe Camel, that was one of the promotional items you could get for turning in proof-of-purchase slips called "Camel Cash." I'm not sure why I know or remember that. As for the O.J. TRIAL, I remember almost everything about that. I lived in Southern California in 1995, and it was impossible to escape the wall-to-wall coverage. Let's see what else is in the grid: DRACO MALFOY? I know a little about him, even though *gasp* I've never read a single "Harry Potter" book. I don't think either one of us has. So, no spoilers, please.

– puzzle by Brad Wilber and Doug Peterson

KEVIN:

Working with collaborators lately has been great fun. Ian's puzzle sense and high standards with skill to match are helpful assets when it comes to co-writing a themeless. We had originally guessed this grid would be run on a Friday.

Will's notes about the clue editing are fascinating. Receiving feedback this detailed is a somewhat uncommon opportunity, so for at least constructors it's just gold. When it comes to writing difficult clues, I've found it can be hard to grasp the difference between misdirection and vagueness, and a number of the comments indeed relate to clues deemed overly vague.

IAN:

Kevin is a rare triple threat in the game: fill, clues, themes. He's equally skilled with all of them. That's his awesome 1A answer/clue combo. So naturally it was a blast to collaborate.

Several marquee entries got scooped before this was published, so apologies if you've already seen entries like PALEO DIET and IPAD MINI in grids. Also, glad to see my clues for 30D (GEL) and 56A (HATE MAIL) made the cut!

Hope solvers like it!

– puzzle by Kevin G. Der and Ian Livengood

It's often hard to remember what actually triggered a puzzle. In this case, I think I was pondering "crossings," like RR crossings — which didn't seem to have much of a future. But PED looked promising, and here is the result. My serendipity moment came with cluing the center revealer, when I hit on the link between the PEDXINGs being at corners and at corner locations in the puzzle. It was submitted in August of 2013.

Will made a slight grid change. I'd submitted the puzzle with INTEL at 31D and SCADS at 32D. And not surprisingly, he changed a fair number of clues. I usually balk at too-obvious gimmes (like Will's "Where China and India are" for ASIA at 14A), so my clues probably tend toward Tuesdayish. I'll try to mend my ways with future submissions.

My only quibble with a clue change is for SALE at 58D. As I write this the week before Christmas with sale inserts spilling out of the paper, "Post-Christmas store event" just doesn't seem quite on target.

For all of you devotees who keep us constructors in business, here's to a 2015 full of great puzzling!

– puzzle by Lynn Lempel

My first version of this puzzle had a self-centered string of I's going down the middle of the puzzle from top to bottom. It didn't look much like a beanstalk, and all that "I-business" caused some problems with the fill.

The second version had BEANBEANBEANBEAN down the middle (15x16 oversized grid) — Will did not see any magic in that.

For this accepted version, I put the only two vertical block groups in the middle, with BEANSTALK connecting them. I was able to "hide" the other words in bigger words ... sort of. I went with the Wikipedia spelling of FEE, FI, FO, and FUM — there were other versions out there. I considered cluing HIJACK as "Bad thing to yell to a friend on a plane," but that would have spilled the beans. Jack and the Giant are attached to the beanstalk, and I envision this as the moment when Jack has just made it down with all the loot he stole from the poor giant, and Jack is about to grab an axe and chop down the beanstalk. The bean salesman will no doubt be harping on Jack for a cut of the profits soon ...

The southwest portion of this grid was hard to fill — HIJACK is tough to work with, particularly on the bottom row. The version I submitted to Will (see right) is quite a bit different than what was published. My favorite entry in the whole puzzle was NO CAN DO at 63-Across, so I was surprised that Will replaced it with GERARDO. I assume he was not pleased with the combination of RENA, STR, ESCE, and IME — pretty bad, I must admit. I take this as a lesson that one is better off with a hard but fair long word, even for early week, than a bunch of weak short "glue."

Hope you enjoyed the puzzle!

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

Because the anagramming makes this more challenging than a typical rebus puzzle, I decided to help solvers out by placing the rebus squares symmetrically. That turned out to be pretty constraining for both the theme answers and the resulting grid.

I spend a lot of time on grid design, and it's worth noting that this grid is definitely an odd one, even for a rebus puzzle. I tried some of the more obvious designs and ended up rejecting them on the basis of fill, before settling on those odd crosses in the center. For instance, the most obvious tweak to the current design is to replace that left cross ...

. * .
* * *
. * .

with this instead:

. * .
* . .
. . *

(where * = black square, . = white square)

This is a much more efficient use of black squares which increases interlock substantially without altering the layout of the words. But it came at the cost of boring or lousy fill and I wasn't willing to pay the high price. That's a judgment call. Better interlock makes a puzzle more fun to solve, and so does better fill.

– puzzle by Xan Vongsathorn

Yay! My first themeless publication!

Though all my NYT crossword publications thus far have been themed, I think I more prefer experimenting with the concept of what makes a "good" themeless puzzle. (If you call it a freestyle, I would advise that you watch less "Dancing with the Stars" and/or Olympic figure skating.) Is there really such a thing as a "final evolution" of themeless crosswords, as exemplified in the PBTI (Patrick Berry Themeless Ideal), an acronym coined by Rex Parker? Or, might there be newer, undiscovered, perhaps seemingly inconceivable grid patterns that, when filled diligently, might also create a(n) equally/more pleasurable, albeit bizarre, solving experience? And, how does the great unicorn that is "style," a.k.a. one's personality as a constructor, fit into all of this? I hope my themeless puzzles make these questions even harder to answer for future generations. =)

As for this puzzle, which I jokingly labelled "MTV.Movie.Thefts" in my files, I toyed with a few ideas: (1) using 14s as semi-spanners and (2) having intersecting marquee entries. Though Will accepted my original submission (see right), I became increasingly dissatisfied with the huge black square formations on the left/right and the fill quality as a whole.

After some further experimentation, I found a nicer looking black square pattern but had to sacrifice my plan for having MICROSOFT, MTV..., GRAND..., and ADULT... intersect in such a way. However, the new grid allowed for better crossings with MTV... and GRAND... Also, oddly enough, ADULT SWIM reappeared as a fill possibility in a slightly different spot! (Prior to this, I had only heard legends of the crossword gods' mysterious ways.) Once I found that BRICK OVEN, in the spot symmetrical to ADULT SWIM, gave some good fill possibilities, the last task was to keep as many bland entries out as possible.

While the entries HEMPS, ETAIL, ADAK, ADAWARE, SNELL, OSAMA and others may not be ideal, I was more satisfied with the trade-offs in this puzzle over those in my previous iteration. Will agreed and opted to publish this one instead.

As for the clues, I see I have much room for improvement, which is to say that Will and his team rewrote new (often harder) clues for about half the entries. My favorite, completely unaltered clues are [Comes to a sudden close?] for SLAMS; ["Verily"] for TIS; [Playskool product tester] for TOT; and [Quite like] for FANCY (fortunately for the large majority of the NYT crossword solving base, I decided to not clue this with respect to Iggy Azalea's chart-topping single; you're welcome). Of Will's rewrites, I particularly enjoyed [Pre-texts] for IMS, [Limited expense?] for TRAIN FARE, [Big name in air circulation?] for SKYMALL (my original clue didn't include the first three words, which are key in giving the pun a fair chance), and [Like many ideals] for LOFTY.

I hope you enjoyed the solve and enjoy the remainder of the holiday season!

– puzzle by David Phillips

This theme originated with my observation that SUPERSONIC contains the word PERSON, so I checked the clue and puzzle databases and didn't see that any constructor had connected the two words ... at least in recent history. I was off to a good start. I explored fill-in-the-blanks, e.g., Su____ic, as one way to express this theme, but a theme entry like PERSON would be too short. Then for some reason, I was inspired to interpret Su____ic as a pictoral description. Aha! MISSING PERSON! All I needed was other examples (and, indeed, they would come to me over time).

Many months earlier, I had advocated that constructors cram less theme content into the daily puzzles, but rather expand the theme from, say, five entries to ten and produce a Sunday puzzle instead. Most editors have low Sunday inventory, so packed daily puzzles simply deprive it from growing. This is why I decided upon a Sunday puzzle after having produced just a single one — a collaboration, even — in 2008.

Sunday puzzles are a bear to fill. Duplicate words in the grid are a frustrating obstacle. But I fought hard against that, and I'm particularly happy with the outcome: the fill contains lively long entries cemented with clean short entries. There are no partials in the fill because clues with blanks are reserved solely for the theme entries today.

Overall, this is among my favorite puzzles on account of the success with both theme and fill. Though, I would have liked Will to keep my title "Blank expressions."

– puzzle by Joe Krozel