New York Times, Monday, December 18, 2017

I stumbled on INNER DEMONS as a nice revealer (albeit a bit dark), but you need some considerable luck to hide a five letter word in reasonably interesting phrases of matching lengths.

There were very few solid options. I would have never come up with CODE MONKEY without the XWord Info word list, but I needed a matching ten letter entry. I made a blank ten letter entry in a grid and tried shifting the word DEMON around in there and looking at the Wikipedia results ... et voila, I got lucky with PRIDE MONTH.

Will and Joel liked those two theme entries the best — CLAUDE MONET was not bad, but I think MADE MONEY was just decent enough to go along for the ride. Happy holidays!

Hidden word puzzle, INNER DEMON pointing to theme phrases with DEMON spanning two words. Some colorful ones, CODE MONKEY my favorite. Some solvers may not know it, but it's thrown around a lot among my coder friends. Plus, it's so evocative! A million monkeys coding away at a million computers could eventually write this blog post …

And PRIDE MONTH, yay! The Pride Parade is a much bigger term here in Seattle, but PRIDE MONTH is no doubt in the news.

I'd seen CLAUDE MONET and MADE MONEY before — maybe even in this same INNER DEMON concept — but they're still goodies. Well, MADE MONEY ain't MADE BANK or RAKED IT IN, but it does the job.

"Hidden word" themes can get repetitive when it's the same exact word found over and over. One way to make it more interesting is to find different synonyms for the word, in this case, DEVIL, IMP, SATAN, etc.

But another way is to choose a string that's tough to find within phrases. I was surprised at how few I could come up with, given how common the letters in DEMON are. So that tightness does elevate the theme a little.

(As a general rule, if you have a huge list to choose from, your theme probably isn't tight enough.)

Strong execution, love how smooth Bruce got this grid. Not easy to do, given that MADE MONEY cut the grid in the half, top to bottom, forcing four big corners. Some RACE FAN / MAD DASH / IM RICH!, LOVE TAP = nice bonuses, too. I wish more of AT A TIME, ANOINTS, SNOWS IN, SOAPING were of the IM RICH! level of sizzle, but it's better to err on the side of smoothness than showiness for a Monday puzzle.

Bruce's attention to detail has improved so much over the years. Such a smooth grid makes for an excellent novice solving experience — it says a lot that I'd happily give this one to any newer solver. If the theme hadn't felt quite as repetitive to me, and if the bonuses had been a little snazzier, it would have been POW! material.