New York Times, Thursday, October 8, 2020

FRANCESCA: I'm so happy to finally have a puzzle published in the NYT.

I've been solving and constructing puzzles since I was a teenager, and when I retired, I decided to focus on getting them published. I was intimidated when I first reached out for help in this endeavor, but I was pleasantly surprised by the generosity and affability of the puzzle community, and the gracious (and helpful) rejections from the editors and staff of the publications. I'm not sure why I thought they'd be snooty — maybe because they are celebrities in my eyes.

Apart from Jeff, I've also been mentored by Vic Fleming and David Steinberg. They both patiently walked me through the dos and don'ts of crossword construction a few years ago. As a result, I published puzzles in the Orange County Register, the LA Times, and Mega crosswords, among others.

I came up with the basis for this theme well over a year ago and went in search of a collaborator. I was directed to Jeff Chen. He tightened up the theme and guided me patiently via 100's (I swear) of emails to this final crossword.

Thank you, Jeff, and thank you to the crossword community.

I thoroughly enjoyed working with Francesca, appreciating her nose to the grindstone approach on both themer exploration as well as gridding. Our original submission got positive feedback from Will Shortz and Joel Fagliano, but they expressed concern with some of our themer finds. They were skeptical if it would be possible to find solid replacements, and frankly, I was too.

Thank goodness for Francesca and her optimism! Many people would have taken the feedback as "thanks but no thanks" and dropped it, but she chose to dig in — from Spain, where she had been quarantined at the start of the pandemic! It took us several weeks of back and forth, but we eventually uncovered enough alternatives to get the go-ahead.

Gridwork is often troublesome for newer constructors, so I was impressed by how quickly Francesca took to it. I showed her a couple of alternatives for grid skeletons — I hope a few people noticed the dollar-sign(ish) S in the middle of the grid? Anybody? Bueller? She jumped right in, working her way up the learning curve, asking all the right questions about what makes for solid or undesirable fill, doggedly filling chunk after chunk, iterating time after time, never despairing over all the rounds of feedback.

A delightful experience. Hopefully, the finished product is worth some of your spare cash. Er, spare time.

(In case you're still baffled by the theme, TIME has been replaced by different synonyms for MONEY, forming different but also in-the-language phrases.)