New York Times, Monday, December 21, 2020

SARAH: I have always enjoyed co-creating crosswords with Derek. (Never a cross word)

Emailing facilitates the task of back-and-forth discussions to reach agreements as to theme entries, grid design, fill, and ultimately clues. This work went through many changes in all those areas.

We initially had several words from which to choose the needed five synonymous theme entries. With BLATHER, PRATTLE, and TWADDLE all being 7 letter words, we were given the flexibility to select the one we needed to fill the NE corner. We sure needed that flexibility to find the best overall fill. The other two were ultimately used as theme clues.

Once it was decided to choose other synonyms and descriptive phrases for each of the theme entry clues, little did we know that we had created more work for ourselves. It required a great deal more site-searching until we found them. In the end, the editorial staff did some tweaking to enhance the outcome. In addition to our theme work, it took more grid work to find entries to meet the New York Times criteria.

It was a long, but well-spent, time as we hoped for and we finally received our final acceptance.

DEREK: It's been a pleasure working with Sarah over the years. As a collaborative team, we now have 3 New York Times puzzles, 3 Simon & Schuster puzzles, 1 LA Times puzzle, 1 Wall Street Journal puzzle, and 1 puzzle-oriented shoebox diorama (complete with construction paper and wagon-wheel pasta noodles). What a long, strange trip it's been!

Sarah is definitely a theme maven. If you look up "Themes" under the Wikipedia page for "Crossword," you'll see one of hers as an example. She came to me with the theme for this puzzle at the 2019 ACPT, and we spent the next 9 months hashing it out, with plenty of guidance from the great New York Times editorial team. Hope everyone enjoys it.

A puzzle filled with malarkey? This one's for you, Mr. President!

Funny-sounding words get tapped for crosswords all the time — a quick search turned up this BEQ puzzle from long ago — but that doesn't mean there isn't room for another. As a "The A-Team" fanboy, JIBBER JABBER made me incredibly happy. MUMBO JUMBO, GOBBLEDYGOOK, and BALDERDASH are fun, too.

I didn't notice that BLATHER was part of the theme until Jim Horne casually pointed it out (and I pretended that I already knew). Huh! It does balance SAY WHAT?, although I wasn't sold on that as a revealer. Why SAY WHAT? and not something simpler, like HUH?

I like the attempt to go the extra mile, but BEQ's puzzle worked fine without a revealer, which would have been reasonable here.

The biggest problem with SAY WHAT / BLATHER is the compromises they force. You don't want a newer solver to run into BAHA and LRON five seconds in. ARCHIVAL (interesting that it's just a letter different from ARCHRIVAL!) is an odd duck for a Monday. LEM is an outdated term. By the time a solver gets out of the starting gate, they've already sloshed around in enough muck that they might veer off for other entertainment. Putting SAY WHAT in the center of the puzzle could have produced better results.

Fun concept that I'd be happy to see again in another decade or two, although I'd want an extra layer to elevate it. Such a shame that this wasn't created with Jan 20, 2021, in mind — JOE BIDEN and MALARKEY are both eight letters long!