New York Times, Friday, February 14, 2014

This is only my second published puzzle — I was introduced to crossword construction by Pete Collins, who coincidentally authored the puzzle from two days ago. Thanks Pete! I've also been inspired by Manny Nosowsky — a surgeon who published his first puzzle at age 59 (like me) and went on to become a legend in the crossword industry.

My original submission for this puzzle had ITS GOOD PR for one of the entries, clued as "This will help our image". I rather liked that one myself, but Will felt it seemed "made up" as a phrase. He liked the rest though, and I was able to repair the defect with surprisingly little impact on the rest of the grid.

If I squint real hard this puzzle grid looks like a diamond ring to me, with four prongs holding the main stone (imagination needed here) and some smaller baguettes in a swirl pattern — perfect for POPS THE QUESTION. Is anyone buying it?

Nice Valentine's Day mini-theme today. I wouldn't want mini-themes in every one of my themelesses, but I really enjoy them when the occasionally pop up. A themeless with a WORLD DOMINATION flavor was one of my recent favorites.

Interesting layout today, many more three-letter words than usual (20). Typically I start to notice a proliferation of them in a themeless when I get to maybe 12-15, so they did bother me a little. Well, the natural ones like YET and CAT remained invisible, while the ITA ITO OPA kind of stuff stuck out. In my own themeless constructions, I hardly ever work with more than 12 of them, but today's puzzle makes me think I ought to experiment.

Why? Along with the extra three-letter words comes a lot of space for longer fill. Not only do we get the usual stacks in each corner, but a couple of nice longer phrases in the middle: KEEP IT UP, LAKE POET (I just learned this, so it felt awesome to plug right in), ON PATROL, PUPPETEER. Yeah, I'm going to have to do some experimentation. Thanks for the push, Bruce!

I did have a bit of trouble in certain sections, EASTON/ITO/EPI notably, and I wondered if something could be done to make the grid easier to work with. I love the aesthetics of it, wide-open with a free-floating windmill, but the fact that there is so much interconnect makes filling tough. I dinked around to see if repositioning a few black squares could help clean up the fill. The grid I came up with would segment things more, making each individual quadrant easier to fill since it has much less interconnect. But even though it reduces the number of three-letter words to 16, the pattern looks uglier to me. Would the hit to the visual appeal be worth some cleaner fill? Hard to say.

Happy World Domination Day!