New York Times, Thursday, January 15, 2015

I am thrilled to make my NY Times crossword debut today. I live on beautiful Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada.

Crosswords have been a part of my life for a long time now but only recently have I taken a more serious approach to puzzle construction. There are three women who I want to thank: my mom for buying crossword books and letting me fill in a few, Jenni for introducing me to "Wordplay" and suffering through my early constructions, and Nancy Salomon for mentoring my first few submissions.

Today's theme came about while I was cluing my first accepted crossword (that first "Crossword — Yes!" email put a grin on my face for days). I wasn't too sure if Will would accept a quote puzzle but I loved the quote and its required punctuation (with an emphasis on 'pun'). And as luck would have it, it split perfectly into 4 long symmetrical entries.

Fortunately, Will liked it too but asked me to revise the fill since it had quite a few undesirable entries. I like that he works with constructors to improve the fill if he likes the theme. My original crossword had the author's name split over 2 entries and it was suggested to remove the name to allow for cleaner fill. After a few email exchanges, Will gave his grid approval and okay to clue. The final result is so much better than my original grid.

This has been quite the learning experience and I am grateful to Will and Joel (and Paula and Anna) for their feedback on accepted and rejected puzzles. This may be my first puzzle in print but it won't be my last.

And you can quote me on that!

What a nice debut. I'm normally not a fan of quote puzzles, as they became overdone a while back, but this one amused me. I like a laugh or a bon mot in my crossword, so who better to quote from than the witty Ogden Nash? I was plus-minus on it all until I got to the last line and its clever use of the hyphen in BALTI-MORE. Very amusing.

In many ways, I found it hard to believe that it was a debut. It's well laid-out, does a nice job of adding in long fill, and keeps things relatively clean. Sure, there's an EER and an ESTOP, an AERO and an AGHA, but those are all pretty minor. It's not quite to the point where I felt like it was super-smooth — that usually happens if there's maybe only two gluey bits — but it's darn close. Even more impressive considering Herre chose to use the difficult "parallel downs" arrangement in MOON BOOT and ART TATUM. So often this requires a lot of paste to hold everything together.

How I loved seeing one of my favorite pianists, ART TATUM, in the puzzle! Now, I personally tend to avoid proper names in long fill, preferring colorful phrases instead, because if the solver doesn't know the person, it's kind of a waste. That's likely the case today, as I doubt many people know or appreciate ART TATUM's brilliance. (Shame on you, infidels.) I did worry a bit when I saw the ART TATUM, DORY, DARYL crossings — three tough entries crossing each other — but ultimately I think they're all gettable, if not inferable.

Fun use of the hyphen, both as a play on words, and as a crossword rule-breaker. Hoping to see more from Herre.