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I'm thrilled to have my first Sunday published! The larger size presented a whole new world of difficulty to fill, but it was extremely satisfying to get a completed grid.

This puzzle began with a theme exactly opposite the current one. I planned for the revealer to be WITHDRAWAL, with theme answers that were common phrases missing the letters AL, such as ICE IN WONDERLAND, FLOUT BOYS, or FAT ATTRACTION. I had just finished a course in computer science, so after I made a list of themers, I wrote a program to make sure I was not missing any juicy potential theme phrases. The program was designed to output a list of all English words that became different English words when the string "al" was removed, and my plan was to look over the list to see if it contained anything interesting that I had not thought of on my own. At the top of the list was the pair "Aladdin" and "add-in," and I realized that ALADDIN would make a great title for a puzzle that involved inserting "al" rather than deleting it, so I decided to change from WITHDRAWAL to ALADDIN.

There were a couple of reasons for the switch. First, ALADDIN makes a better title than WITHDRAWAL because ALADDIN is unrelated etymologically to ADD-IN whereas WITHDRAW and WITHDRAWAL have the same stem. Secondly, subtracting letters can make it difficult to tell what the base phrase is, but this is less of a problem when letters are added because then the base phrase is still present in its entirety. Therefore, I turned the theme on its head, and the result is what you see. (By the way, thanks to Mrs. Prosser and Lori Levin for teaching me the requisite programming skills!)

I always struggle to balance cleanliness with liveliness. In this grid, I was especially happy to fit HIPSTER, PUSSYFOOT, and APLOMB, but there are also a few entries I would rather have done without; if I'm ever brave enough to attempt another Sunday, I would like to include more interesting non-theme answers. In addition, my favorite Sundays usually have extra theme layers (for an example, see pretty much any Sunday by Elizabeth C. Gorski), so I would also love to try my hand at adding extra elements to the theme.

– puzzle by Tom McCoy

I could write an ESSAY about this, but I'll keep it short! (Relatively...for me). I simply liked the simplicity of "S.A." phrases and that it was a play on the pronunciation of ESSAY.

Tried to make all five interesting, mostly excited about SNOOZEALARM and SMARTALECK. The crowning moment for me was to realize SYDNEYAUSTRALIA was a perfect 15. It was not SHEERAGONY to make!

As always, I envisioned this as a Tuesday, because of the non-immediate obviousness of the theme, the fact that there were five theme entries, plus a reveal.

The clues were left 90% intact. One exception, I had 21A "___ Eye for the Straight Guy" which was one of my favorite guilty pleasures back in the day. I saw every episode...twice! Not thrilled to have QUEER defined as "Odd", but that certainly is one definition.

Wanted to liven it up with QUEER, QATAR, SMUTTY, JIFF and WAHOO crossing with MAGOO. Needless to say, this was originally a pangram, but the V magically disappeared when Will's intern Joel redid the bottom SE corner which was LAVA/OUST/CVS/KAT and is now MANE/SUNG/CNN/KEG.

I'm happy all around but didn't really remember the impetus etc. from a year ago. I was heavily involved with a book of essays on not having had children. The book is called No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Parenthood. When I googled ESSAY to find when I submitted this puzzle, 200 emails came up around the same date about the book. So ESSAY must have been something seared in my brain.

– puzzle by Andrea Carla Michaels

This crossword was assembled during the fall of 2012. Although several of the edited clues now look unfamiliar, I'm still almost positive that I was the guilty party. I was going for a gradual reveal of an unknown answer, somewhat similar to the feel of playing Hangman. Having WORD GAME as the circled unknown answer — with the added feature that it be the sole, communal clue for all the puzzle's theme answers — seemed like a nice, mischievous twist.

I have always loved playing word games with family and friends. I've had three particular game favorites over the years, one being "PROBE", from Parker Brothers. It's a card-based diversion similar to Hangman, and appears in this puzzle as a theme answer. The other two? Well, put it this way: if you are willing to play a little of my second favorite word game (6 letters), the third's name (11 letters) can be unearthed within this puzzle grid.

There are seven theme answers bouncing around in here, plus the WORD GAME reveal, which was intentionally positioned to not share any letters with the themers. This means that the theme material tends to ooze into about every nook and cranny of the grid. All that oozing can sometimes have an effect on a puzzle's word fill quality. Hopefully this, my ninth NY Times outing, has a minimal number of fill "HAEC-cups".

Come to think of it, a crossword puzzle is quite a bit like a word game, too. So, thanks to everyone who chose to play this game with me. As always, it's been a lot of fun.

My other two favorite word games? Boggle and Bananagrams.

– puzzle by Jim Hilger

I'm most interested in crosswords as incubators of what's weird and exciting in language and culture, and this puzzle, constructed in August, clued in December and submitted in January, is very much a product of its cultural moment. ARCADE FIRE's "Reflektor" had just dropped in late October, and I had it on constant rotation as I completed the puzzle. Nelson Mandela passed away in December, as I was cluing, and JACOB ZUMA, in the news for something other than a political scandal (for once), was doing his best to eulogize his forebear, despite the apparent irony. Freida Lee Mock had recently completed and released Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, a chronicle of ANITA HILL's involvement in the Clarence Thomas affair, and, having been raised a captive audience to this and a few other scandals in the '90s, I couldn't resist when her name appeared as an option.

Besides ANITA HILL and my seeds (JAVASCRIPT & DAKAR RALLY), the only other include-or-die-trying entries for me were NARUTO, which Will thankfully liked, and — my fav — ANABIOSIS, which some might guess is a subpar "glue" answer, since no one knows what the hell it is. In fact, it's the coolest thing here.

Feel free to harass me on Twitter (@melvillmatic), and enjoy.

– puzzle by Kameron Austin Collins

The seeds for this puzzle were the SPAMBOT stack, WALKOFF, and FOOSBALL. With those in the grid, I worked clockwise, trying to get clean and interesting fill along the way. I was originally thinking of WALKOFF as a stand-alone entry (e.g. "Big Papi hit a walkoff last night.") but HOMER serendipitously popped up in the course of filling the puzzle. The southeast corner was pretty bland in my initial draft. I threw an X in the corner to see if that would lead to anything fun, and that ended up being my favorite corner of the puzzle.

Though this grid has no entries longer than 8 letters, I liked the look of it and how the grid flowed with no isolated sections. Brad Wilber had a similar grid in a puzzle a few years back which gave me the confidence that a grid of this design (no long entries) could be accepted as a NYT themeless.

This was my first puzzle accepted by Will, and I spent a LOT of time on the clues. But clearly cluing themeless puzzles, at least for me, also requires experience, and Will improved the puzzle immensely by changing a lot of clues to get them into Saturday-shape. My favorite clues that made the final version were: 15A, 25A, 55A, 67A, and 49D. I also liked seeing the "#1" clue make the final version, echoing Anna Shechtman's puzzle of last week. I hope folks find the puzzle a fun and worthy Saturday challenge!

– puzzle by John Lieb

I've often used the phrase "the whole nine yards" in conversation, although I don't remember how or why it came into my lexicon. An internet search revealed that its origins are unclear, although it was probably derived from "the whole six yards", whatever that means. "The whole nine yards" first appeared in 1907 in a small-town Indiana newspaper, disappeared from usage for a while, and then reemerged during the 1960s. Other words have been substituted for "nine yards", most of which have no related meaning other than to fortify the concept that "the whole" is all inclusive. The oldest of these is probably "ball of wax", the origins of which are also obscure. Why some of these phrases have survived the test of time and others haven't is a complete mystery to me, and sparked my interest in the puzzle theme. Interestingly, I didn't use "nine yards" in the puzzle, because it would be a bear to clue.

– puzzle by Mark Feldman

I constructed this puzzle a long time ago . . . in April 2012, to be precise! My seed entries were SKINNER BOX, GOOGOLPLEX, and the symmetrical 15-letter musical entries from different time periods I SHOT THE SHERIFF and SOULJA BOY TELL'EM. I used double stacks instead of triple stacks in the top and bottom sections of the puzzle to maximize the quality of my two other 15-letter entries; I was pleased to be able to incorporate some lively 7-letter entries, such as MADE MAN, NETWORK, and KRYPTON, in the spaces where an additional two 15-letter entries could have been placed.

Looking back on this puzzle two years later, I might have tried to rework the bottom right/center area to eliminate entries like OESTE, RETAR, and X'D OUT, or refilled the upper left/center area to include fewer proper names (even though I'm a huge fan of ALTON Brown's Cutthroat Kitchen!), but I'm still happy with how this puzzle turned out overall. As always, Will did an excellent job making the clues wickedly clever! My favorite of the clues from my original version is, "Animal whose tongue is more than a foot long" (quite fun to research!), but Will's "Extremely long string" for GOOGOLPLEX and "Word menu option" for ROGET are so much more fun. I hope you all enjoy this puzzle . . . and crank that Soulja Boy!

– puzzle by David Steinberg

In my four semesters at the University of Delaware, crosswords were, all in all, my biggest distraction. They were also the biggest thing I had going for me there, as my second published one (11/11/11) made me arguably the most famous freshman on campus. And even though I have left Delaware and regained focus on my studies closer to my home in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, crosswords remain my #1 hobby.

Today's puzzle is one that I have been very proud of, ever since I completed it, clued it, and submitted it in October 2012. (I put it in the mailbox exactly four days before my fourth NYT puzzle ran so that I would not have nothing left in the tank, so to speak, after that puzzle ran.) I would have liked it to be supersymmetric, with 7's going all the way around the perimeter of the grid and rows and columns 7 and 9 being spans, but the switch to a mix of 8's and 6's made it much easier for me to make the four longest entries be fresh and interesting.

My favorite of the 12's is IDIOSYNCRASY, as even though it's the only single word among them, I find it fun to say! I also like CRANBERRY BOG a lot, as well as JOAN BAEZ (what a great 1A!), SCHERZO, DENARII, FINIAL, LAST EXIT, ISLAMIST, JILTED, ZONK OUT, KATMANDU, GO ROGUE, and CRONKITE. As for clues, Will kept almost exactly half of mine. Some of the new ones that struck me were those for 15A, 26A, 30A, 59A, 60A, 21D, 35D, 47D, and 55D.

Finally, I am truly amazed and honored to have set the bar for the cycle, now that I've had a puzzle published on every day of the week. Jim Horne noted that David Steinberg completed the cycle with his ninth NYT puzzle (3/9/13), and David Kwong matched the feat with the puzzle that Horne named his Puzzle of the Year for 2013 (10/31/13). Though I have now done it in only eight, Steinberg did it in less time than I did, and I now encourage anyone who wants to do it in only seven, the absolute minimum, to make an effort to achieve that goal.

I look forward to my next publication, but I will not lose focus on my studies. I hope you all enjoyed my puzzle!

– puzzle by Alex Vratsanos

As with other puzzles that I've done with seemingly random added letters, this one came from having one of the phrases pop into my head — in this case, it was 32-Across (LEAVENING LAS VEGAS). That the added letters formed a spelled-out letter, and could also be a word or a symbol, presented some nice possibilities for titles and other theme angles, but I decided to just have fun with some silly phrases and leave it at that. I did happen on 90-Down (ENDASH) while filling and thought that would be a nice nod to the theme.

The only theme clue Will changed was 99-Across (ENSIGN OF THE ZODIAC), in which I'd originally referenced the motorized rubber raft brand. It probably is too obscure, but I did enjoy the image of a naval officer being relegated to the command of a rubber raft.

Some other clues were tweaked by Will for the better and for the benefit of the solver. One of the harder ones, my initial AGNEW clue was [Veep who called some opponents "an effete corps of impudent snobs"] — the fact that I'm old enough to remember that event fairly vividly (as well as my mother's pin proclaiming she was "An effete snob for peace" — groovy, baby!) is consistent with the equally mind-blowing fact that I am the proud father of two kids who've gone through college: well, Happy Father's Day to me — and to all you solvers!

– puzzle by Tony Orbach

My first version of this puzzle had Bill Bixby and Bill Bailey in it, which Will felt was repetitious. It also had BARBARA at 9-Down, which was just plain lame. My second version had solid theme entries but had some fill issues — the third try was accepted. It sat in the queue for a few months and I noticed I could eliminate the one partial phrase and the word KLAN, which Will was happy to do. I had KLAN clued as "Sheetheads?" — that might not have cleared the editing desk. In this final version I notice that one of Will's assistants made a couple small changes in other parts of the grid, so this baby may not be perfect but it has been pretty well worked over. Any weakness at this point can be attributed to Monday constraints and 109 letters of theme fill, or 130 if you want to count BULB, BABE, BARB, BIBS, and BABAS. You might think the 23 B's in this puzzle would be close to a record — would you believe the record is 48? At one point Will told me to just give up on trying to work BTEAM in there, because the puzzle doesn't really need a theme revealer. However, I found a different place to wedge it in, and MNO was the only real downside. Hope you liked it!

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

There are a couple of embarrassing truths about this one.

The first is that there was a grid design long before any theme concept materialized. Most of my ideas for puzzles are directly inspired by other constructors' creativity and execution, and in this case I wanted to try to construct an asymmetrical themeless puzzle with subtle thematic content, much like Joe Krozel's CREVE/COEUR (July 10, 2009) and Elizabeth Gorski's JOHNNY ONE-NOTE (December 10, 2010). Lacking any kind of plan, I just played around with blocks, hoping to stumble upon something that could be a viable backbone. The question mark design was simply the first grid that gave me pause, and the TWENTY QUESTIONS concept only surfaced after I'd already tried and dismissed several other ideas.

The second is that the cluing concept of the published version is radically different from the concept of the submitted one. My very inferior — and probably semantically incorrect — idea was that 20 of the entries would be clued with a wordplay-style clue ending in a question mark. You can still bear witness to my legion of awful puns in the clues for TIARA, EAU, CUE STICKS and DEF.

Be thankful for editors. Mr. Shortz saw my vision more clearly than I ever did, and with his lambent touch effortlessly improved the puzzle to the point at which I'm not even sure I should receive full authorship. In my limited constructing experience, nothing else begins to approach how truly confounding and humbling it was to open the preview puzzle a week ago and see my middling concept eviscerated, transformed and then rebuilt into the polished product you see today.

In the end it's fitting that this puzzle is running today, the sixth anniversary of Joe Krozel's LIES puzzle (June 19, 2008) — a puzzle which wasn't on my mind while making this one, but is perhaps the puzzle that this one ended up most closely resembling.

– puzzle by Timothy Polin

I'll come right out and say it: sorry about the two 15-letter "ONE'S" phrases in the top area of the puzzle. There are two reasons for this:

(1) Sheer laziness on my part. 15-letter "ONE'S" phrases tend to be easier to use, especially in stacked-style grids, and ...

(2) This puzzle was constructed more than two years ago, and the whole anti-ONES movement had yet to gain full momentum. So back then, I tended to use them a lot more than I would now.

Moving right along, a little about some of the other words in the puzzle:

LETTS: He's currently starring on Broadway in "The Realistic Joneses". Last year, he won a Tony for best actor in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and way back in 2008, his play "August: Osage Country" won both a Tony and a Pulitzer. Sure beats [Some Balts].

OREO: Back in Maleska's day, this would have been clued : "Mountain: comb. form". Brand names were largely verboten.

ETTORE: Is Italian for Hector, apparently.

HERSHEY BAR: I understand these are quite popular in America.

OLIOS: Ah yes, some old-fashioned crosswordese. You're welcome.

THES: It's what us Brits drink in France instead of cafés. Technically we call this a FPOC (French Plural of Convenience).

STAFFA: Wordsworth, and a whole pile of his poet buddies, wrote oodles about this island, and Mendelssohn based part of his "Hebrides Overture" on it.

LORA: If you thought there'd be loads of famous women who would spell their name this way, you'd be wrong.

– puzzle by Martin Ashwood-Smith

Brad:

My original intention was to do the entire top half and tag Byron, but I ended up giving him just a corner. I had to laugh that he engineered a nifty section with TAD LINCOLN, as I had tried that over and over again with no clean fill. I hadn't mentioned it to him in advance; we won't call it mind-reading exactly, since the –LN ending was one of the better choices. I recall that we had more back-and-forth choosing the fill for the bottom than we did for the whole of our puzzle of Nov. 30. 36D was a new word to me, and having Byron slot that in really tidied up that immediate area. I particular liked the Walden clues for 40A and 59A — I think the upper left might have been too hard with his original clue for 16A, but I'm keeping it mum so he has a chance to use it again.

Byron:

My memory of the construction was Brad started with the lovely NE corner, I got the TAD area working with a helpful assist from the egregi..., um, I mean innovative partial at 2D. Brad zipped off at least a couple of excellent SE corners. Then I slogged through with something OK in the SW but Brad noticed a bit of a dupe and buffed up that area to fix it. Beyond his greatness as a constructor, Brad really just shines as a co-constructor. I'm not even sure the 16A clue I wrote is harder than what's in the puzzle, just hard in a different way. Several clues are like that, especially 52A, which was clued in one option as the recentish Jake Gyllenhaal movie. I imagine that would be easier for some and harder for others. Hopefully the headaches are spread evenly and pass quickly.

– puzzle by Brad Wilber and Byron Walden

The second puzzle I ever made and submitted to the NYT had the theme COVERT RELATIONS with family members hidden in the theme entries, but it was not accepted for publication. So I tried again with something similar but better in this puzzle, my third submission, and it was really exciting to hear that Will liked the theme for this one! He immediately spotted some terrible entries and crosses, and we went back and forth a couple of times improving the puzzle. This process alone was so instructive. I had thought that including some bad fill would be somewhat inevitable due to the constraints of the grid. I did not realize how hard constructors work to exclude the chaff. Ripping out and remaking most of the puzzle with better fill vastly improved it. Will was impressively patient and gentle while giving excellent, targeted advice.

I have always enjoyed solving puzzles. When I was a child, my dad used to give me copies of Games magazine and let me take the first stab at the NYT Sunday crossword when I was lucky to get one or two short entries. I even recall making a cat-themed logic puzzle as a present for my mom once. I never had any idea how to make a crossword puzzle however, until a few years ago when reading an online article by Matt Gaffney that discusses some rules of construction ("It Themes Somehow Familiar"). After browsing the Cruciverb and XWord Info sites (which are both such outstanding, essential resources), I tried making my first grid. Trial and error were good teachers and confirmed the reasons typical construction methods are the way they are. Constructing, like solving, is a skill mostly learned by just doing it!

I'm thrilled to be able to contribute to something as wonderful as the NYT crossword and hope to have the free time to make more puzzles in the future!

– puzzle by Heather Valadez

The first version of this puzzle was crafted in late 2012. Will said that the puzzle was "fresh and amusing," but thought some of the theme answers and the revealer clue didn't make sense. He encouraged me to try again, which I did in 2013, resulting in a much better set of theme entries. However, this time Will commented that I had far too many 3-letter entries (24) for the puzzle. The final version was submitted in January of this year and accepted, with requested modifications in one corner which were easy to implement.

My submitted thematic clues were far more complicated than those in the published version. I suspect I never did rid the puzzle of the confusion that Will noted early on. My struggle from the very beginning was to find a good way to clue the theme. In my set of clues, the revealer was: "Where to find two-part answers to asterisked clues" (IN BED). Examples of my themed clues were: "*Neared a pesky insect?" (BROACHED), or "*Obstructed a door fastener?" (BLOCKED). My clues were intended to be two part clues leading to an embedded two part answer; however, it gets complicated because the revealer (IN BED) is also part of one of the answers. In hindsight, I don't think any of my variations on this approach ever quite did the job. Indeed, just the effort to explain it here is illustrative of the problem. As a result, Will simplified the theme with the clues as they appear, with a revealer clue of "How breakfast may be served…or how the answers to the eight starred clues should be entered?" The clue for BROACHED became "*___Motel" and for BLOCKED became "*Bit of hair."

I very much appreciated Will's encouragement and editorial changes, which greatly improved my initial attempts. In the end, it is an absolute delight to get my second puzzle published in the NYT. Makes all the effort worthwhile — having trained as a lab scientist long ago, I am used to failed experiments! I follow Lone Watie's advice (from the movie classic "The Outlaw Josie Wales") — "endeavor to persevere". In fact, I am still trying to work ENDEAVORTOPERSEVERE (19) into a puzzle. I did once, cluing it as "Advice to cruciverbalists." Unfortunately, the puzzle was rejected.

– puzzle by Pawel Fludzinski