New York Times, Thursday, April 24, 2014

Inspiration this time began with recalling a puzzle I published more than 20 years ago, by the late, immensely talented constructor Elizabeth Wilkinson. All of the clues in her "T PARTY" 15x15 started with the letter T, and there were multiple T-shaped black square patterns. That puzzle got me thinking about clue-restriction themes that would be somewhat more opaque.

After coming up with the fixed-syllable idea, I offered it to Will with his choice of all three-syllable or all four-syllable clues, without having a specific day of the week in mind for it. Will accepted it for a Thursday (which he continues to be non-rebus short of), and chose four syllables.

The fixed-length message didn't leave a lot of flexibility for its placement in the grid. The crucial thing I wanted to take care of first was the Down answer for the X in EXACTLY. FEDEX looked good, and I placed the black squares nearby in such a way as to have as many options for the EDE crossing letters of FEDEX as possible. Then I placed the rest of the blacks, trying to have as low an answer count as possible. I briefly flirted with a 72-answer grid, but couldn't get that to work without answer compromises, so I reworked the grid slightly to the 74 answers finally used.

There were two additional subtle aspects to filling in the grid. First, the puzzle couldn't have any partials requiring fill-in-the-blank clues — how exactly does one pronounce underscores? Having abbreviated clues/answers seemed more of an inelegance than a problem to me, since one does pronounce many common abbreviations as if they were the spelled-out words. Still, I had wanted to avoid abbreviations entirely, and nearly did so — there's only AGCY in the answers and "yr." and "Mrs." in the clues.

Writing the 74 four-syllable clues turned out to be rather slow going, to come out to my satisfaction. Cluing "tough" for a Thursday was extra-tough with this added restriction. Also important to me was to avoid any clues that seemed unnatural or "forced," wanting to keep the theme a surprise for as long as possible. One more special wrinkle I had to watch out for: avoiding words with multiple common syllabifications. That's why my first thought of "Holy mackerel!" for YIPES wouldn't have worked.

Still, the harder clues turned out with all the variety and difficulty that I strive for with my less-restrictive tougher crosswords. Sometimes, that difficulty comes from a lesser-known fact about a well-known thing (like LATEX used for the scratch-off layer of lottery tickets), sometimes from multiple possible answers (at least four five-letter ones for "Colleague of Kirk"), and sometimes forcing you to think about things you know in new ways (like "Hive, in effect" for NEST). I'm pleased to say Will felt the need to totally redo only a dozen or so of my clues.

I hope I succeeded in surprising and pleasing you with this quirky theme.

What a workout today. Having the three main theme answers be opaque until the very end made this one play like a quote puzzle. Eventually I was able to piece it all together, and afterward, I felt like I had just done ten sets of ten weighted pull-ups.

Okay, five sets of five.

Would you believe three?

Fine, I did the flexed arm hang! But yes, I was drained afterward.

As with most all of his puzzles, Stan does a nice job of laying out this one and filling it with quality. With just three themers, I would expect there to be some snappy longer fill, and Stan doesn't disappoint. LOANER CAR is beautiful, my favorite of the bunch, but LIFEBELTS was also quite nice. I had no idea what a RALLYE was, but it was fun to read up on. Even MCCOY brought back some nice memories of "Star Trek." I would start saying "Dammit Jim (Horne), I'm a writer, not a Javascript coder!" But being from Canada, I think Jim would likely just say, "Eh?" Politely, of course.

And as with Stan's "Saturday Stumpers" in Newsday, he does a great job of avoiding the icky short stuff. AGCY isn't great, nor is HIRER, but if those two are your worst entries, you've done a nice job overall. Good care taken with his construction, as always.

To me, the theme felt somewhat underwhelming, sort of an afterthought to having solved the puzzle. I suppose I could have gone back to marvel at each and every clue having exactly four syllables, but after a quick peek at three or four clues, it seemed to check out. I just wasn't sure why four syllables was significant, or why it was four syllables instead of four-letter words, or 140 characters, or something else with some rationale behind it. Would have been really nice to have some additional layer, some unifying theme revealer to pull it together.

Anyway, a good, hard workout. In closing, my favorite clue = [What takes a stand?] = TBALL = super fun (both TBALL the game and the clue — I may or may not have totally beat my nephew the other day at TBALL and rubbed it in his face). I love the clever repurposing of "taking a stand" here.