Marshal Herrmann author page

This puzzle's theme was inspired by Jeff Chen's commentary on this website! Jeff is an incredibly prolific and accomplished constructor, so his commentary was a tremendous resource when I was learning about crossword construction. One puzzle had the entry TETE-A-TETE, which Jeff noted appears commonly, partly thanks to its "perfect vowel-consonant symmetry" which is friendly to construct around. I thought to myself, "I wonder if I could make a whole puzzle with alternating vowels!" I was working on a puzzle with a similar theme at the time, which was published in the NYT on January 16, 2024 (my debut puzzle!). If you liked today's puzzle, you should solve that one if you haven't already.

Other than VOWEL as a revealer, the grid was a blank slate which can be both a blessing and a curse. I opted for this grid with the two double stacks which quickly resolved my blank slate "problem." They were tricky to wrangle, but too striking and irresistible to pass up. I iterated on and off for over a year before happily submitting this version. Hope you enjoyed it!

I used a regex query along with Adam Aaronson's invaluable Wordlisted tool to modify my wordlist. Some numbers: Only 5% of my wordlist has alternating vowels, but that's mostly driven by the longer words: While 29% of 3-, 4-, and 5-letter words have alternating vowels, only 14 out of nearly 13,000 (or 0.1%) 15-letter words have alternating vowels. Of those 14, only 3 (!) begin with a vowel (the other one was ON A POSITIVE NOTE). Being able to stack two pairs of those 15-letter words in a relatively open grid with a limited wordlist demonstrates just how useful that vowel pattern is to constructors. Interestingly, I had nearly the opposite constraint in my first NYT puzzle, where the short fill was significantly more impacted than the long fill.