New York Times, Thursday, October 12, 2017

Unlike many puzzles, I clearly recall the genesis of this one. While working on another grid, which will be appearing in a different venue next year, I came up with the clue "Mustered" for one of the entries. I found the similarity in sound between mustered and mustard amusing and contemplated using the clue "Mustard, say?" as a playful reinterpretation of the ", say" crossword cluing convention. I ultimately decided to just go with "Mustered," but I thought it would be fun to create a puzzle using that gimmick.

In my original manuscript, the across clues were all in the form "XXXX, say?," and I avoided using that cluing convention in the down direction. I hoped there would be a fun aha moment discovering that in this case "say" literally means to say the clue out loud, and I was a little disappointed that Will et al. decided to scrap that idea in favor of a note to the solver. Perhaps it would have been too frustrating as I originally designed it.

As you might guess, creating this puzzle was a very time-consuming (and manual) process. Perhaps I'm a glutton for punishment — all but one of my published NYT puzzles to date have required unusually labor-intensive construction techniques.

I started by locking in some of the longer across entries and then gradually building out the grid from there. Due to the homophonic cluing constraint, I repeatedly had to redo completed areas when I couldn't get them to work with the rest of the grid. Notably, there are only four three-letter words in the across direction. Somewhat surprisingly, these three-letter slots were the hardest to fill. It turns out that, relatively speaking, slots of length four or more are much more amenable to homophonic shenanigans.

Loved this idea, cluing all the across answers using a homophone of a real clue. My favorite was MOBILIZED … how could that mean [Mustard]? Ah, it meant [Mustered]! Clever.

[Instants] for CASE also gave me a nice a-ha moment. I hadn't cottoned to the trick, so I entered in a terminal S because of the plural clue. Got me! It's [Instance], singular. Perfect.

So, so, so tough to pull this off so that every single across answer is cluable in this manner. That means no partials, no proper names, no trivia, etc. Have to stick to all regular words and limit yourself to ones that might somehow be cluable to a single word that had a homophone. I can only imagine how many times Alex had to reboot. If just a single across entry didn't work ... yikes!

Although Alex did an amazing job of making most of them solid, enough jarred me that overall, I felt like I couldn't give this the POW! The biggest offenders were the ones that broke crossword conventions, like [Flour] for PEONY. Yes, a PEONY is a type of flower, but the clue would always be [Type of flower] or something to that effect. I struggled so much because that convention is in the very marrow of crosswords, and breaking it without explanation doesn't seem fair. Same with HAM = [Meet] = [Meat], RYES = [Lickers] = [Liquors].

Also odd to get [Re] as a clue. What is "Re" in real life? I can't imagine a normal clue looking like that — maybe [Re, e.g.] for "musical note." [Dun] also would be a weird clue in a normal crossword, as would [Missal].

And LANES doesn't quite equal [Rhodes] ("roads"). Too much of stretch for my taste.

Perhaps it would have been better if the one-word constraint had been lifted, replaced by "a homophone anywhere in the clue"? If even half of those awkward clues had been fixed to seem normal, I would have given this the POW! I admire Alex's big thinking.