New York Times, Monday, February 6, 2017

This puzzle was a huge learning experience for me. I worked on dozens of iterations of the theme answers, originally wanting to include two more cameras as long, crossing downs, but I couldn't ever get it to work right. At one point I desperately had HITABEATNIKONCE ("Utterance by a 1960s bully recounting when he punched Jack Kerouac?") spanning the middle. I gave up for months, and then one day wondered "What if... Sputnik was actually called Sputnik One? Wouldn't that be convenient?" and from there decided to scale back the ambition a bit and just get the thing finished.

I learned a lot about the publishing and revision process and got some great assistance from Joel and Will, who helped clean up a couple of corners that weren't that great in my original submission. I also learned that my word list has a lot of tedious re-ranking in store for it.

This is my first published puzzle, and I am very grateful for all of the help I've received during the entire process. I would especially like to thank Peter Gordon and Patrick Blindauer for their immeasurably helpful tutoring sessions.

Debut! Andy gives us HIDDEN CAMERAs, i.e. CANON, SONY, NIKON hidden across phrases. PRISON YARD is a snazzy phrase, evoking images of one of my favorite movies, "The Shawshank Redemption." I wasn't familiar with SPUTNIK ONE, just SPUTNIK, but it was interesting to learn the full name. It does appear to be SPUTNIK 1, not SPUTNIK ONE, but crosswords often play fast and loose with numbers that way.

I CAN ONLY HOPE is also good, although not as peppy to my ear. I found myself testing other phrases to see if another felt more spot-on. LETS HOPE SO sounded better, but that's personal preference.

Another minor ding for I CAN ONLY HOPE: CANON fully contains one of the words, CAN. This isn't going to matter to anyone but us crossnerds, but I find "hidden words broken across a phrase" themers much more interesting if only part of the hidden word is in each of the themer's words, like how SONY and NIKON are hidden.

Ambitious grid for a debut, only 72 words (max allowable is 78, debuts often are 76 or 78). Andy had to work with relatively big swaths of white space, most notably in the NW and SE corners. Note how HIDDEN CAMERA and NEAREST EXIT intersect, with the mid-length BASMATI and TESTER weaved right in — that makes for a tough area to fill.

While I did enjoy those entries, I wasn't sure they were worth the price of IT'S A and ERINS, given the other gluey bits in the puzzle. Having multiple instances within a particular category of glue makes these shorties especially noticeable: ERINS is made worse by ERIKS.

But I did like how Andy spread out his crossword glue into different categories in general: MDT, ITSA, ERINS, EXO, IRED are all different types of crossword glue. As a whole, it's too much for my taste in a Monday puzzle, but at least there aren't five partials or five plural names, etc.

Simple theme, audacious grid. I'd have preferred less audacious, which would have helped smooth out the fill. But the wide-open grid does allow for some interesting mid-length extras like THE HELP and LAMPOON.

ADDED NOTE: Reader Ed mentioned that the black squares in the middle look like tiny cameras. Neat effect!