New York Times, Friday, March 20, 2015

I am a retired nuclear engineer, and I live in Kitchener, Ontario. I started constructing crosswords in the summer of 2012, in order to try out the computer program I wrote for filling a crossword grid. After I debugged the program, instead of moving on to another software project, I stuck with crossword construction. Looking back at my early efforts, I can't believe I actually submitted them.

Since then, there have been many rejections. It's taken a while to learn how to use my tools properly, to improve the wholly inadequate word list I started with, and to get a better feel for the crosswords that appear in top publications like The New York Times. Things started to come together for me in the fall of 2013 and, as I write this, I have sold a handful of puzzles.

This is my debut crossword in The New York Times. I will remember it primarily for that, but also for being the first crossword I sold that didn't require any revisions to the fill. I put this puzzle together in late 2013, after I had taken a break from crossword construction to do some much needed work on my word list. The striking grid layout, with its crossed triple stack 11's, has appeared in The New York Times before.

When I did the construction I had already experienced many rejections, and had not yet sold a single crossword to any publisher. In that circumstance, you have doubts about everything you produce. In particular, I remember wondering about GRANDNEPHEW and OILSEED. They're both not-often-used terms that didn't offer many possibilities for clues. I didn't get my hopes up when I submitted the crossword. I was elated when it was accepted.

I would like to thank Will Shortz for his improvements to the clues. My favorite is 31A: [Event often with gate crashers?] GIANTSLALOM.

Debut! Beautiful sets of triples through the middle, GIANT SLALOM / MICKEY MOUSE (as an adjective!) / COMEUPPANCE just delightful. SMARTY PANTS and MISS MANNERS had a nice echo (said the guy who think spoons don't need to be washed). GRANDNEPHEW seemed a touch arbitrary, but the Augustus / Julius Caesar clue made it work well.

Visually striking pattern, which I thought I had seen before. If there only were some web site where you could figure out when similar (or identical) grids have been used … Press the "Analyze this puzzle" button (at the very bottom of the page) if you're interested, and scroll down to "Topologically similar grids."

In this sort of arrangement, coming up with intersecting triple-stacks is just the beginning of the quest. I love how open the grid is, how well the solving experience flows through every region. But having both ends of each corner fixed into place by those triple-stacks causes so many constraints. Much, much more difficult than having regions which connect to the rest of the puzzle in just one way.

Roland does well in the SW. I'll always appreciate seeing entries like EUCLID and ATHENA, targeted at the erudite NYT audience. MONARCHY is similar, and also taught me a little bit about Saudi Arabia. All of that with no gluey bits = great stuff.

The NW felt a little rougher to me. Perhaps that's because I got so stuck, I had to cheat to finish. But the unfamiliar EBBETS and SAGER weren't terribly satisfying — didn't feel like answers that I really ought to have known. And while I really like BOOTLEG, NO IDEA, and DOG TAG, BIG YEARS didn't feel strong enough to give me a hit-my-forehead moment of discovery when I revealed that answer. Personal taste.

Finally, a beautiful clue that took me a full day to understand. How on Earth could SNAKED equate to some sort of [Wound]? Maybe it referred to a snakebite? Some dictionary definition #57 of a stabbing that only 16^th century British scholars would know? No, it's wound as in "wound around." Now that's a great moment of discovery.