New York Times, Saturday, December 11, 2021

This is my first NYT puzzle since the birth of my daughter, and it is dedicated to her and her amazing mom. I submitted it before her conception, so it's fitting that my clue for 22A survived the edit! Family and friends may also spot the homage to my mom — a mighty practitioner of both the written and spoken word, and the person most responsible for my love of language.

I'm excited to be sharing my work with Saturday solvers for the first time, and hope this provided the anticipated challenge. I can still remember the first Saturday I ever solved — well, my friend Tom mostly solved it, but I made some useful contributions, including the realization that the clue "Player coached by Hank Stram" was generic rather than specific. (April 12th, 2008 — a Walden, which unsurprisingly holds up quite nicely.)

That particular solve gave me a real boost — I started attempting Fridays and Saturdays solo during college (occasionally completing them), and, after graduation, embarked on my earliest construction efforts.

I began this at the 17A/14D crossing, which I envisioned as a micro-theme (though initially the answers were not cross-referenced). From there, I built in a generally southeasterly direction, focusing on preserving flexibility (i.e., letter patterns with several answer options, and answers with several cluing options). I hadn't intended to feature the pair of grid-spanning downs, but as I experimented with different lengths for those slots, the grid seemed to click into place this way.

Themelesses featuring grid-spanning 15-letter marquees can be tough to pull off since these long entries take up a lot of real estate. Often, the rest of the grid isn't juicy enough. Not today! Fourteen long answers (8+ letters) is about average for a themeless, so hitting the norm while featuring great REQUIRED READING and PENCIL SHARPENER is an excellent result.

Standout clue for PENCIL SHARPENER, too — making good points in the classroom, heh. I love these types of themeless entries because not only are they colorful, but they lend themselves to such delightful wordplay.

The marquee entries were solid, but Hal hooked me at TAQUERIA crossing QUESADILLA. The former mystified me until I remembered how much I love mole sauces, and the latter made me crack up, remembering Marshawn Lynch's cameo on "Brooklyn Nine-Nine."

AND a QQQ staircase, with the Q of IRAQ / QUEST? I love it even more, considering how well QQQ has treated investors over the past two decades.

I worried about wastage when I encountered ISOTONIC and NEAR SIDE, but everything else was thumbs-up. I've jumped to work in EUROZONE in some of my constructions, only to realize that it's boring because it's hard to riff on. Wish I had thought to play on "tender union."

I also enjoyed the freshness of HI TOP FADES. I attempted to give my neighbor's two-year-old a HI-TOP FADE last year, to disastrous results. Good thing hair grows back quickly.

Icing on the cake was RUMOR MILL, a great entry made even better by its amusing clue. I didn't know what a dirt farm was, but that didn't stop me from loving the wordplay.