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apparently it's been three years since my last NYT puzzle! lest anybody think i've dropped off the face of the earth, or at least from puzzleworld, i can assure you that is not the case. i've been devoting most of my puzzlemaking time to outside the box puzzles, where i construct variety puzzles for an audience of email subscribers.

having said that, i've been trying to get back into making "regular" crosswords on a "regular" basis. i'm pretty sure this one started with the observation that EKCO is an anagram of COKE, and then wondering if there were other people whose last name is an anagram of a soda brand. there weren't really enough to support a whole theme of just people's names; in fact, it was in researching this puzzle that i learned that JUDAS PRIEST is a band, not the stage name of a solo artist. but broadening the search to two-word phrases enabled me to go to five theme answers plus a revealer, so i was satisfied—but i think the puzzle would not have been worth making without both COKE and PEPSI represented.

– puzzle by Joon Pahk

A few years ago I decided to make a Mother's Day puzzle for my mom, a longtime fan of the NYT crossword. Hi Mom! I ended up building so much stuff — filling algorithm, word lists, etc. — that I decided to see what else I could do with it, and so here we are. It was an amazing process working with Will and Sam, and I couldn't be more grateful to them for the opportunity to appear in this venue.

The first puzzle I submitted was a different 66-word grid, about which the less said, the better. The grid you see here with the arrangement of six 14s is the second one I submitted; this puzzle is my third attempt at it. When I got the response to the second try, and the subject was "Crossword — good news!" my heart jumped — only to sink a minute later when I saw, among the generally encouraging feedback, a request to redo the NE corner to remove OREOTHIN and SWA. I knew the former was impossible, given how much the 8s and the 14s in this grid interact with each other.

I made a hard-fought effort, including going up to 68 words and adding cheater squares in various places, but there was no way to remove that singular cookie. I felt it was a great opportunity that Will had invited me to submit my next revision by email, and I didn't want to waste it, but after a week all I had was a version that was identical except for the one letter changing SWA to SZA. I found that rotating the grid by 90 degrees opened up some new possibilities, and so I made a brand new puzzle to accompany my revision and sweeten the deal. I was curious to know what the editing team thought of that one — I felt that the 14s were stronger and the 8s weaker, but I wasn't sure how it balanced out — but I never found out; they accepted the single letter change and all my dreams came true.

I hope you enjoyed solving this puzzle as much as I did making it!

– puzzle by Lewis Dean Hyatt

This puzzle began life as a different piece of music. And the solfège notes came at the end instead of the beginning. That iteration, however, had a problem. The solfège notes in one of the theme entries were (despite orthographic identity) pronounced differently in the base phrase. It was tough to let that version go, but the resulting consistency in pronunciation makes the theme a lot stronger. Good thing that DODO, SOSO, LALA, and SO sound the way they do!

This puzzle's revealer could also have come from "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," which shares the same first seven notes as "The Alphabet Song." Both (along with "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep") derive from the French children's song "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman."

I hope the non-thematic music-related entries, RIHANNA, ONO, BASSI, TURNTABLE, EAR, LES [Misérables], and SXSW are a nice plus for solvers. It's fun to sprinkle theme-adjacent material into a grid, but sometimes I worry that it might be a distraction. Hopefully I struck a good balance here.

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

ERIK: Can't spell "Bruce Haight" without "bright"! As a solver, I'm always excited to see this multiple Orca nominee's byline on a puzzle, so it's an honor for me to join him for his 43rd NYT crossword.

BRUCE: Erik is the reigning ACPT champion, having blown thru a super tough finals puzzle in the record time of 4 minutes 58 seconds back in March of this year. So many people wanted so badly for him to get his first win there, and for him to do it in such dramatic fashion was amazing. Also in March, he was named as one of the two crossword constructors of the year (for 2017) by Diary of a Crossword Fiend. When you work with a brilliant 25-year-old like Erik you try to stay out of his way and not embarrass yourself.

The "grid-art" here was my idea, but Erik came up with the fabulous second theme entry WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA. He also came up with about 90% of the fill on this grid — the inside of the bulb was particularly hard to fill cleanly. I wouldn't have even known how to spell MEGADETH, and since I am 65 years old, you would be right in guessing I don't have much of their music on my iPhone. The clue for 31-Across was Erik's idea also — pretty funny I think.

It was a ton of fun working with Erik, and thanks to Will and the editing team for allowing BADASS and making us fine tune the fill. I'm super pleased with the way the puzzle turned out - hope solvers enjoy it!

– puzzle by Erik Agard and Bruce Haight

This grid is actually a revision. The top right was the same, as CHEAT DAY / ROGUE ONE / ALAN ALDA was too good to let go. But ZOE KAZAN used to be in the bottom left, which created a corner filled with so many proper nouns and difficult words (e.g. ENFILADE) that I was asked to redo it. So ZOE KAZAN moved up to the middle area - I simply could not pass on those Z's - and finding a quad stack that connected with it was very time consuming. Discovering that delicious combination of LIMEADES / MAGRITTE / PLAYTEST, the last of which could pass as a seed entry, was pure luck. Overall, my notes grew to over 250 partial fills that were good enough to consider submitting, an indicator of how stubbornly I clung to my seed entries.

For the clues, I decided to forgo a self-imposed deadline for finishing them, and instead simply selected a few unclued entries at random each day to clue and only finalized something if it was really good. Only about a third of them ended up being changed whereas in the past it's been half or more, which is encouraging. For instance, I'm pleased with 26-A, 1-D, and 32-D. One category of clues that tended to be changed were tricky clues for entries that are less well-known. For example, I had "Fast break?" for CHEAT DAY, which would be quite difficult for a person who's never heard of the term; the same is true of "They're related to hobbies" for KESTRELS. To me these are fair for, say, a tournament final, but it seems that they're too hard even for a Saturday.

– puzzle by Kevin G. Der

I started this puzzle with X-RAY SPEX, and once I built out the upper-left corner, I noticed BBQ JOINT might work well in the symmetrical location. From there, it was a matter of finding a layout which would cleanly connect the two sections, and then filling the remaining two corners.

Like with my last Friday puzzle, there are some aspects of this one that don't quite resonate with me now. For instance, I doubt I'd choose to intersect OREO THIN and EASY TEN in the lower-right corner, along with some tough proper nouns nearby, if I were making this today. The upper-left also feels strangely heavy on technology-related vocabulary for a puzzle I made (trust me). However, with regard to the upper-right, I remember not being thrilled with ONE-A or NYY but going with them because I thought that the six and seven-letter words in that corner seemed particularly lively and well worth the compromises, and I still stand by that decision.

One cool thing about themeless construction is that the constraints that have already been placed on the grid sometimes bring to mind lively entries that I most likely would not have considered otherwise. SNOWY OWLS was my favorite option for 32-Down, and is perhaps my favorite entry of the whole puzzle. They're such majestic creatures. I'd be glad to encounter one in real life— unlike the SCANTRON, which I wouldn't mind never encountering again now that I've graduated, but I think it makes for a fun crossword entry anyways.

I'm pleased to see that my favorite clues of mine— those for 1-Across, 13-Down, 14-Down, 25-Down and 36-Across— made the cut. I just competed in my first Scrabble tournament, so it's nice that my clue for STAR survived as well.

Finally, it might be of interest to some that I originally constructed this with SCANTRON at 1-Across, but flipped the Acrosses and Downs upon completing the grid as, for some reason, the layout of black squares looked strange to me, and I also preferred the top row of SIX-PACK and BOO HISS. I'm not entirely sure I'd do the same thing today. The longest entries in the puzzle are Downs, which is a bit unorthodox— but then again, so am I, so I guess I'm down with it. Happy solving!

– puzzle by Trenton Charlson

We decided to build the puzzle when Ben realized that the phrase "Netflix and chill" was 15 letters. It felt a little risqué, so we were delighted when the puzzle was ultimately accepted. Our initial construction effort, however, got off to a bad start: Ben had misconfigured our construction software such that it only offered single-word fill — no phrases!

We eventually figured out how to use computers properly, and when we were able to pair BUTT DIALED with FLIP PHONES, we knew we were onto something. We struggled a bit with the north-center — we're not particularly proud of the AREEL/AREI intersection — but we hammered away until we had something we were happy with.

Cluing the puzzle was especially fun. We each took a copy of the completed grid and, working alone, wrote up a full set clues. Then we compared clues for each entry in a series of TETE A TETES. Our cluing was helped by a simple shell script James wrote, called `cross`, which let us see all the past NYT clues for any entry we were considering (basically a worse version of this site!).

On to the next one!

– puzzle by Ben Gross and James Somers

As originally submitted, this puzzle contained two stacked revealers intersecting the final N and E of SATURNINE: ROMAN GOD and PLANET. That arrangement necessitated a couple of cheater squares under PLANET and made the fill a bit rough in the lower-right corner. Therefore, I was asked to revise the puzzle to just use the single revealer PLANETS.

At the time, that seemed like a reasonable trade-off — sacrifice the second revealer to remove four cheater squares and get better fill. Looking at the puzzle as it goes to press, however, I realize that without the additional ROMAN GOD revealer, the theme feels a bit incomplete. Although the Earth isn't named after a Roman deity like the five planets alluded to in the puzzle, it is nevertheless a planet. I wish I had added EARTHEN or EARTHLY once the ROMAN GOD angle was lost. It would have even been symmetrically balanced by MARTIAN.

Perhaps this puzzle is better suited to the Ptolemaic system where the Earth isn't a planet, you say? Alas, that arrangement doesn't quite match what I've presented either. Under a geocentric model, the observable celestial bodies are arranged in concentric spheres around the Earth: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the fixed stars, and then the Primum Mobile (which accounts for the diurnal motion caused by the Earth's rotation).

Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto weren't included because they aren't visible to the naked eye and were only discovered after the invention of the telescope. By the way, Uranus is the only planet in our solar system (besides Earth) that isn't named after a Roman god. It's named after Uranus, the primordial Greek god of the sky.

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

Hi Crossworld! Thrilled to be making my debut. My fascination with crosswords started at an early age; as a kid I cut my teeth on Newsday puzzles in my hometown of Baldwin, NY. At some point when I was 8 or 9 years old, I remember trying to construct my own puzzle. The only thing I recall about that attempt was that it included the answer OMS, which I clued as "Orange Mammal Society." I know - so many questions. None of which have good answers I'm afraid.

Years later I turned to crosswords as a diversion during a 90-minute commute to NYC every morning, but as a technologically-challenged Xennial, it never occurred to me that an NYT app existed. So there I was, crammed in with grumpy Long Islanders like a human rebus, bumping along towards Penn Station trying to write my answers legibly in a copy of Will Shortz's Wittiest, Wackiest Crosswords.

Eventually, I realized that I could be doing puzzles on my phone instead. I downloaded the app and was stunned to discover that I suddenly had access to 20+ years of NYT archives. After plowing through hundreds of puzzles, I started toying with the idea of making one of my own. Three years and seven submissions later and here we are.

I must take a moment to thank Will and team for their patience and encouragement along the way. It would have been easy to quit after multiple rejections, but they were always careful to call out some positive feedback and leave the door open for future attempts.

Once I settled on this particular theme, I set out to find the most colorful entries that would fit the mold but was constrained by a self-imposed rule that both sides of the [AD] be valid standalone entries. The four themers didn't end up as snazzy as I would have liked, but I hope that some of the livelier fill makes up for it. As a personal bonus, I was happy to be able to incorporate my wife's name (32D) and birthstone (15A). I was also pleased to see that roughly half of my clues made the cut, including my faves at 38A, 8D, and 27D.

One final note — I tried every which way to put the revealer at 63A or 64A and failed miserably. Three P's and a U in the bottom row = permanent dents in my wall and forehead. The 61A/62A row was no picnic either. Moving the revealer to 8A took all that pressure off and allowed me to load up on some interesting 7-letter entries, albeit at the expense of saving the revealer for last. From the solver's perspective, this seemed like a worthwhile tradeoff. I hope you agree.

Happy solving folks! Hope to be back soon.

– puzzle by Michael Paleos

In the crossword world, low-hanging thematic fruit can be hard to come by. This makes building ‘freestyle' puzzles an attractive proposition for many a budding constructor.

Development of this puzzle began with the lower-right corner. My goal was to stack three jazzy, new, and perhaps even quasi-related entries (see: Matt Ginsberg)—with minimal to no fill compromises. That corner, which I filled manually back in 2015, established the grid's block pattern. The puzzle's layout is comparatively straightforward from a constructor's perspective because it is relatively segmented. This means you can start building out from any corner, and you likely won't need to tear out your work later on.

I would revisit and complete the grid two years later. The awesome chain sweetgreen introduced me to the KALE CAESAR salad; once I discovered it on other menus, I figured it was worth a cruciverbal shot. I hope that entry was, at a minimum, inferable/worth a chuckle! I was thrilled to be able to incorporate BIG PHARMA, PERP WALK, PH TEST, and "BWAHAHA!!!" My one real fill regret is HAYS, though today I might replace LUSTS FOR as well.

I've always enjoyed wordplay, and I attempted to clue up this late-week puzzle with a hefty serving of linguistic gymnastics. In the end, most of my submitted clues didn't make the cut. Will & Co. came up with great clues for 1-A and 44-D; you can blame me for 39-D. For those gluttons for pun-ishment, here were a handful of my sneakier concoctions:

10-D: One might accompany a charge

26-D: Lightly push back?

41-A: Sore spots?

51-D: Veiled remarks?

– puzzle by Evan Kalish