New York Times, Tuesday, March 13, 2018

I've been constructing logic puzzles for a while (see gmpuzzles.com and recent US Puzzle Championships for examples), but crosswords are entirely new to me. Thanks for your patience while I'm learning, and I hope you enjoyed this puzzle as much as I did.

I started with ESCAPE ROOM---a fun entry that was still unpublished at the time, (but has appeared twice since my puzzle was accepted in August). As a computer programmer, it was natural for me to take the theme the direction I did. Once I struck on the KEY WEST revealer, I was sure this could work.

Little did I know how much effort there is between settling on theme entries and completing a puzzle. I could never have succeeded without the help of an expert mentor. Huge thanks to Craig Kasper for his patience with countless revisions. Craig also deserves credit for suggesting ENTER SANDMAN and teaching me a lot about grid design and evaluating fill.

My first revision of the puzzle was rejected for poor fill, but Will and Joel kindly encouraged me to try again. My second submission still had some unacceptable entries, but primarily concentrated in a single corner. Will had a colleague take a crack at fixing that corner and sent me the result. It was an improvement in every way, so thanks, unnamed colleague!

It's interesting to see the changes the editors made to my clues, (39 of 80 clues were changed). Many of the changes were minor, but every change improved one or more of clarity, specificity, smoothness, appropriate difficulty, or liveliness. Any clunkiness that remains is entirely mine.

One thing I will say about the clues is that if you find a turtle snapping at your finger, don't blame me!

Debut! And what a neat concept in KEY WEST = KEYboard keys to the west (left side) of theme answers … and they're all KEYs that reside on the WEST side of the KEYboard! SHIFT, CONTROL, ESCAPE –

(sound of record scratching)

ENTER?

Darn it! It was going to be such an elegant theme. Why not use ALT COUNTRY or (shudder) ALT RIGHT?

Oh. ALT and TAB are already in the grid?

Huh.

I can see the allure of "bonus answers," drawing in constructors with their siren song. I didn't personally notice them as a solver though. And I wonder if they detracted from the theme.

Or detracted from the fill. Hard to say for sure without testing, but fixing ALT and TAB into place seems like it'd create problems — problems like the TARO / JURE crossing. Both words could be rough on newer solvers, and crossing them accentuates the issue.

I was impressed with the smooth gridwork, especially from a debut constructor. Granted, it is an 80-word puzzle, two over the usual limit. That's a reason why there wasn't much strong bonus fill besides JAKARTA and AZALEAS. But if Carl had just used his REFUELS and ETHANOL slots a little better, I wouldn't have even noticed the dearth of bonuses, and thus wouldn't have gone searching for a reason why.

If I were Will, I'd allow all newer constructors the freedom to go above 78 words — just as long as they work in enough snazzy bonuses.

I wanted so badly to give this the POW!, as the theme seemed so clever on multiple levels. Bah, ENTER, a pox on you!

Okay, ENTER SANDMAN is a pretty awesome song …