New York Times, Thursday, March 12, 2015

After a year-long hiatus from constructing crossword puzzles, I decided I was ready to try again. I had an idea, but I was not confident enough to proceed on my own. I introduced myself to Jeff in July 2013 and asked him to help. Thankfully, he was up to the challenge.

I remember riding a roller coaster at Silver Dollar City a long (long) time ago. At one point in the ride, everyone yells "Fire in the hole!" before taking a plunge. That *has* to be where the idea came from. Otherwise, I don't know where my brain got it.

One of Jeff's best suggestions was to have the "holes" segregated from the rest of the black squares in the grid. I think it makes for a better representation. Jeff did a lot of the heavy lifting on this one, and I couldn't find any reason to change what he created.

The clues received their usual editor's touch, and my favorite (new) clue is for 19-Across: [Response that has a nice ring to it?] IDO! It's so hard to come up with new ways to clue entries that appear so frequently.

Thanks again, Jeff, for the collaboration. And thanks, Will, for publishing our puzzle.

Ellen approached me with this idea, and I thought it had a lot of promise. I wasn't at all sure that we could 1.) find enough "___ FIRE" and "FIRE ___" entries, and 2.) arrange them in pairs so that the surrounding fill wouldn't be compromised. Especially difficult given that we wanted the "holes" to not be connected to any other black squares.

If there's anything that drives me, it's a challenge. So I enjoyed working with Ellen to figure out if this was feasible. A key factor was using varying lengths — not just all ???? FIRE and FIRE ???? entries, for example — so that we had a large enough pool of words to choose from. Then it was "just" a matter of trying out hundreds of combinations and black square arrangements to make it work.

Spending so many of our black squares around those two "holes" meant that the NW and SE had to be giant, wide-open spaces if we were to keep to the 78 word max. Fun challenge, and not too difficult if you're okay with a few pieces of Thursday-ish toughies.

Speaking of that, we originally targeted a Thursday-ish puzzle, but Will thought it would be neat to run it as a Monday, replete with a fire visual in each hole. Nice idea, and well worth taking a jackhammer to the NW and SE sections to redo them completely so they'd be Monday-easy. We could have increased the word count past 78 to make it a whole lot easier on ourselves, but 1.) I like a challenge and 2.) I'm stubbornly moronic. Not easy to fill those huge chunks of space without relying on non-Monday bits of crossword glue.

I was glad that Will ended up changing it back to a Thursday, where I think it really belongs.