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SANDE: Today's puzzle came to pass after lengthy back-and-forths between Jeff and me about the appeal (or lack thereof) of themes where you drop the same letter from real phrases to create funny theme words (letter-drops). When we started on the letter "E," we felt a lack of challenge and newness. So rather than drop "E," the 2^nd vowel of the alphabet, we chose to exclude the 3^rd vowel of the alphabet. That was perfect because we found a revealer that was spelled from only "legal" letters — EYELESS. And to up the ante, we opted to exclude the same vowel not only from the theme words—but from the whole puzzle!

Well, here's what happens when you do that: you search through the enormous heap of words from your word.lst and delete all words that have the verboten letter, so only "legal" words make up your word.lst. Guess what? Much to my shock, the word catalog shrunk more than 50 percent! There were no longer 232,051 words to choose (from Jeff's magnum word.lst). There were only 110,452. (Gulp!!) After the puzzle was complete, we reasoned, "What the hell! Why not exclude the verboten vowel from the clues as well?" Took me aback; what a challenge that turned out to be too.

Can't say enough about Jeff. How lucky for me to have found such a collaborator.

– puzzle by Sande Milton and Jeff Chen

This puzzle has a long history. I originally submitted it in 2011, and it was accepted shortly after. It got lost in the stack, and a few years passed. It almost ran in late 2014, but at the last minute, a test solver realized that Andrew Reynolds had written a similar puzzle which ran on April 1, 2014. Rather than running two similar puzzles in the same year, mine was pushed back to now.

Of course, I was less than happy about this chain of events at the time. But 2018-Xan is a whole different person than 2011-Xan, and 2018-Xan is thrilled he gets to enjoy the publication of a crossword puzzle he didn't even have to write. Plus, we get a nice opportunity to compare two independent versions of the same idea. Andrew's puzzle is fantastic.

For me, coming up with a crossword theme is a systematic exercise. My basic goal is to surprise people in some way, especially seasoned solvers accustomed to seeing the same tropes over and over. One approach is to consider an assumption that solvers make, enumerate a few ways that assumption might be violated, and then see if you can think of a thematic justification for each violation.

In this case, I was brainstorming ways to sneak an extra layer of meaning into the idea of a circled letter. (Another puzzle from the same brainstorming session can be found here). For no particular reason, circles are commonly used to draw attention to letters in crosswords. So common that we normally don't think about the circle itself as carrying any meaning; it could just as well be a diamond, or gray shading. But here, the circles form the edges of coins, and what do coins do? They flip. It was a nice idea that also gave me the opportunity to push harder on the boundary of double-cluing.

Seven years ago, after this somehow possible puzzle, I had the bold feeling that if you gave me two words, and I thought long and hard enough, more often than not I could come up with a single clue that worked for both of them. Many theme answers in the present puzzle make this task deliberately hard. I was motivated by the idea that it is more surprising and satisfying to discover two answers that differ by only one letter but have hugely different meanings, covered by a single clue parsed in two very different ways.

Overall, I would say the resulting double clues are "better than you'd expect, but not quite good enough." With the benefit of seven years of hindsight, I would dial the ambition of the theme answers back a bit!

– puzzle by Xan Vongsathorn

This is the last themeless I constructed before heading off to college in the fall of 2015. I spent a good part of that summer scoring all the 3-6 letter entries in my various word lists, and so I was excited to test out the fruits of my labor in a themeless grid. Having a scored word list made my life a lot easier—I was suddenly able to squeeze in more zing than ever before while still keeping the short fill smooth. All the cruddy entries I'd been rejecting manually for years no longer showed up as possibilities, because their scores were finally low enough that they didn't make the cut.

Nowadays, I've gotten so used to having a scored word list that I've forgotten what it's like to construct without one. The one thing I wish is that Jeff Chen's XWord Info word list had been around at the time since scoring your word list from scratch nowadays is like reinventing the wheel. Jeff deserves a huge shout-out for making a quality scored list available to everyone in the community!

– puzzle by David Steinberg

ALISON: I am a grad student at UC Berkeley in global health and infectious disease. I went to Emory University as an undergraduate and then got my Master of Public Health degree from Berkeley in 2017. I started "solving" the NYT crossword with my grandma when I was a kid (with erasable pens) and got more and more into solving them during grad school (with normal pens, mostly). On a whim, I started making puzzles a few months ago with a friend after we saw that Rex Parker (Michael Sharp) had offered his help to any aspiring constructors. Rex referred me to the Facebook group called the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory, and I sent my first-ever puzzle to a handful of "test-solvers," including Erik. The feedback I got from the dozen or so people who replied was all genuinely kind, supportive, and helpful. I'm so grateful for everyone's help and encouragement—especially from Erik, who became my de facto crossword mentor, and then co-constructor. We began collaborating on a few puzzles and submitted "Ghosted" in the middle of April.

ERIK: Ever notice how in the phrase "green energy," ENERGY is GREEN mixed up with a bonus letter? We set out to find out if there were any other phrases with this property; a computer-aided search turned up a large handful of possibilities, ranging from the erudite (ALFRED ADLER, ANDRE DERAIN) to the colloquial (FAST FACTS, RIDE-OR-DIE). Alison noticed that, using only phrases that dropped the letter in the second word, we could spell out PHANTO, which we found to be (most of) an apt description of the disappearing letters. The toughest part was trying to find phrases for the M and the S, since nothing in our wordlists would work and we had to search manually. How did people do this stuff before computers? Thanks to Alison for sharing her debut byline with me, and to the NYT team for having us.

– puzzle by Alison Ohringer and Erik Agard

MARK: Andrea floated the idea of MAKE LOVE NOT WAR as a possible four-word phrase to form a puzzle roughly a year ago. We brainstormed four lists of lively theme entries, one each starting with MAKE, LOVE, NOT, and WAR; then developed a grid with matching-lengthed pairs. I suggested upping the ante with 6O'S as the antepenultimate down entry to act as a revealer since this position felt like the most likely slot to fill around — requiring only one entry that need start with a number. We settled on a SW corner of:

6BALL

ORIEL

SALTS

Will and company liked the idea, but wanted an actual 0[zero] instead of an O and also a different 6 entry, since "the 6 would be a shot in the dark for solvers who don't know their pool balls." Valid points, but oh my goodness, this ratcheted up the challenge significantly! After a couple of days of concerted effort, the final version emerged and passed muster. Whew! Always a pleasure working with Andrea; hope you enjoyed our efforts as much as we did.

ANDREA: What more can I say? I love Dr. Diehl. You dream something up, and he comes back with 50 choices of how to make it work. This was a follow up to our STILL WATERS RUN DEEP. I love the 60s in the corner because it took a straightforward idea and gave it a super fun little twist.

– puzzle by Andrea Carla Michaels and Mark Diehl

The inspiration for this puzzle was BEER BELLY. My original submission featured that phrase as the central revealer rather than the more prosaic BEER INGREDIENTS. I was amused by the idea of finding HOPS, WATER, MALT, and YEAST in the "bellies" of the theme phrases and imagined the ingredients mixing together to form beer, which, when imbibed in large quantities, forms a beer belly. Will and crew thought that that was a bit of a stretch (hah!), but still liked the basic idea enough to warrant another go-around with a different revealer.

I'm curious to hear what solvers think of the "find the theme" aspect of 37-Across. Since the clue doesn't include an independent reference to the phrase BEER INGREDIENTS and the hidden words aren't circled, solvers must find the four ingredients while simultaneously figuring out that they can be combined to make beer.

My proposed clue for BEER INGREDIENTS contained a semi-hint harking back to my original idea (What's found in the "bellies" of 16-, 23-, 47-, and 59-Across) and my submitted grid had circles around the relevant theme letters. I like that the edited version creates a more powerful aha moment, though I worry that it might be a bit tricky for a Tuesday.

Usually, it's best to avoid themers of length 13 since they have limited grid placement possibilities, but IOWA TERRITORY was the only cromulent phrase I could come up with to hide WATER — so 13 it was. Likewise, I only had one option for YEAST (HAPPY EASTER). Luckily, I found phrases of length 13 and 11 for MALT and HOPS, respectively, thereby appeasing the gods of crossword symmetry.

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

This had to be the fastest acceptance of all time. I snail-mailed the puzzle on a Friday and got an email back on Monday!! I couldn't believe it had even gotten there already. Will said he wanted to use it for a Monday, but I'd written Tuesdayish clues. So he asked me to suggest easier clues for some of the answers. He also said he was concerned that my clue for MAKE PASSES was awfully harsh, and he asked me to soften it. So the clue was changed to what you see today, from my original [… invite a sexual harassment charge].

As is very often the case, this idea simmered for many moons before I could come up with a final themer to balance DRAW A BLANK. I wasn't really thrilled with MAKE PASSES, but at some point you have to just throw in the towel and go with something.

Will did ease up slightly more than I did on the clues, but overall they're not far different from my revised version. A clue he didn't change was the one for AKA. I hadn't expected that to survive!

– puzzle by Lynn Lempel

ERIK: Easy puzzles are so hard to write! Many of our tougher themes have seemed to develop almost instantaneously, but when we sat down and decided to try for an early-week publication, it took us several hours of rejected ideas and general head-scratching to come up with this one theme. Getting a sufficiently clean fill was not without its challenges, either; Andy's grid wizardry saved our bacon a couple of times when I was sure the task would be impossible to complete.

ANDY: I was surprised this wasn't slated for a Monday, though I expect many solvers will welcome a breezy Tuesday.

One challenge we had with filling this grid is that although all the theme answers are 11 letters long (and thus theoretically interchangeable in the grid), we agreed that the articles of clothing should be ordered in the grid from top to bottom as a person would wear them. The loveliest touches in the fill — RUBY DEE, CRAZY HORSE, SHREK, RUMBA, etc. etc. — are Erik's handiwork.

I do miss our original clue for THREE-WAY TIE, [Article of neckwear for Cerberus?]. It brought me no small amount of joy to imagine a three-headed hellhound wearing a little tie on each of its necks, though I admit that the Three Stooges are more suitable for an early-week puzzle.

– puzzle by Andy Kravis and Erik Agard

Constructing a themeless puzzle is hardly like navigating a major river — the fill rarely flows smoothly and obviously to completion. It is much more like navigating an unfamiliar river delta filled with a variety of channels to pursue. At some points along the journey, there may be picturesque entries to savor and exhilarating rushes of discovery, but there will also be stale shallows, stagnant pools, and even dead ends that force retracing one's progress, sometimes all the way back to the start!

Today's puzzle was my favorite course, but pictured to the right and left were a few other lower deltas I explored and left behind.

Hopefully, you enjoyed the boat ride I chose for you.

And Jeff, feel free to add ARGON LASER, ANTIVIRALS, ACACIA OIL, and TOWEL RINGS to the excellent XWord Info Word List [plug, plug]! Maybe someone else can debut them.

– puzzle by Mark Diehl

ANDREA: As I'm sure is true of many constructors, I'm thrilled to have a puzzle published in the Times for the first time. It'll be a bit surreal to see a puzzle I already know the answer to! As a biology teacher, I'm particularly excited that my first puzzle has an evolution theme and uses Charles Darwin as a reveal. John was really fun to work with, and his deep experience in these matters paired well with my instinct to push the envelope. I think we've come up with a fun and interesting challenge.

JOHN: Andrea teaches a course on evolution, so we started brainstorming themes related to that and the building up to DARWIN emerged as a fun possibility. There was not a lot of flexibility in theme entries (D, DA, and DARIN did not have many choices) so we were fortunate to be able to get symmetric theme entries. It was great fun making this puzzle with Andrea, going through the various grid layouts and discussing why this theme ultimately did not give us too many options to choose from.

My mom recently started doing the NYT crossword, so I am more aware than ever of the different generations doing the puzzle. TENACIOUS D will, I'm sure, be unknown to her, and to many (we worked hard to make the crosses fair!) but hopefully having a nostalgic BOBBY DARIN at the end will balance things out.

– puzzle by John Lieb and Andrea Yañes

I thought that CROP ROTATION would make a good revealer for a puzzle with answers going in multiple directions, and decided to use rebus squares for the ‘crops' so that both answers passing through the rebus square could ‘rotate'.

Grid design was of paramount importance. In fact, unlike the typical construction process, here I worked out the basic grid design first and then selected theme entries. I wanted the longest puzzle slots (not including the revealer) to contain rebus squares, while preserving good flow through the grid. After much trial and error, I finally hit on the pattern of long Acrosses in rows 4 and 12 (fixed by the 12-letter revealer) and long Downs in columns 3 and 13, which gave me a great deal of flexibility in black square placement. I breathed a sigh of relief when I confirmed that I could cross CROP ROTATION and STO{RY E}DITOR at the I, and DUCHESS OF {CORN}WALL and ELECT{RIC E}ELS at the C.

A fun etymology fact I learned during construction is that the place name ‘Cornwall' has nothing to do with maize or any other food: the 'corn' in the name derives from an ancient Celtic word meaning ‘headland'.

– puzzle by Kyle Dolan

NO SIR. IMS. PRELIM. ASAP. SAND PILE. WIN. The clues for these answers are all Will's; I can't take any credit for them outside of giving my thumbs-up to the guy while editing together. They're much better than my originals.

AERIE. DOYLE. MY FAIR LADY. IVIE. The clues for these are my own, but after coming up with replacements per Will's thoughts:

• [Aptly named clothing line from American Eagle] felt a bit too similar to recent clues for AERIE, even if this was a lively angle.
• ["A Scandal in Bohemia" was his first short story] seemed like a better clue for "Arthur Conan Doyle" rather than just DOYLE. Would you ever refer to him by only the final part of his name?
• [Musical whose main character has a Cockney accent] for MY FAIR LADY, on a Saturday? Too easy!
• [Good name for a botanist?] just didn't quite nail IVIE, which was crucial for such a weirdly spelled name. There had to be a better profession to associate "ivy" with.

All the remaining clues are either entirely my own or were slightly tweaked for style/clarity (like adding "in the 1960s" to the NEODADAIST clue, changing "sweet, spicy" to "sweet-and-spicy" for BBQ WINGS, etc). I'll call it all a major constructing 59-Down!

This is all to say, I've learned by now how rewarding a concerted cluing effort can be ... and how much the results can elevate the puzzle no matter which day of the week it falls on. While lively, fresh vocabulary is what makes a grid sing on its own, sometimes clues can come in and turn otherwise normal entries into highlights for the solver.

Perhaps the EAU clue elicits a memorable "aha" moment, or native New Yorkers enjoy the fresh take on METS. Those "Coiner of the word ___" clues, like the one for CARROLL, tend to be interesting. Notice how none of these involve question marks, either; fresh, smoothly executed puns are a welcome sight, in my book, but they're just one way to enliven the solving experience.

I'll hop off my soapbox now. Here's hoping you solvers aren't a tough crowd!

– puzzle by Sam Ezersky

About a year ago I set out to create a puzzle that honored one of the most talented athletes of all time - Serena Williams. She had just given birth to a daughter, and was expecting a return to the tennis scene in the very next season. Absolutely incredible!! I figured the opportunity to run a Serena-centric puzzle may present itself.

Unfortunately, it wasn't in the stars. But Will et al. were intrigued by the visual elements I had included in the grid, and wondered if I could broaden the theme a bit. So I figured, for The New York Times — let's make a puzzle about one of New York's biggest sporting events of the year!

The visual elements of the puzzle went through some changes: originally, the racket was closed off from the rest of the grid - a big no-no in crosswords, of course. One draft had more shaded squares than just the BALL — two lines down the middle of the racket, with TENNIS RACKET spelled out inside, for example. I'm pleased with how it turned out, and hope solvers will enjoy it as well! I'm especially pleased with the fact that my title made it through edits - "To The Point" acting as both a toast to the sport of tennis and a nod to the pun-tastic spirit of crosswords.

This is only my second puzzle to be published in the New York Times, my first being an Ella Fitzgerald tribute puzzle — also with a cool visual element involved. This feels like a nice followup, but I do hope to one day have one of my non-visual puzzles accepted! If the next one is also visual, well, who knows. Maybe it'll just be My Thing!

– puzzle by Olivia Mitra Framke