New York Times, Thursday, April 3, 2014

David:

The most remarkable thing about this puzzle is that Jeff and I were freshman roommates at Stanford in 1989-90. At the time, neither of us were really puzzle people. But eventually, completely independently, we became accomplished constructors — especially Jeff, who's a constant presence in New York Times puzzles and runs XwordInfo. I construct the weekly Jewish-clued Jerusalem Post crossword puzzle, which is syndicated in more than a dozen North American Jewish newspapers. This link shows several examples.

Being a crossword solver isn't so unusual. Being a crossword maker is, and being a crossword maker with lots of published work really is. It's just weird that we each stumbled across this highly specialized avocation separately.

I'm the one who first wondered if the four English ways of pronouncing the phoneme "CH" might be a good theme, and Jeff tied it all together with his brilliant 15-letter revealer at 58-Across.

My favorite clues (at least among the ones I wrote that Will kept!) are 23-Across ("Sin Alternative?" for COT), 40-Across ("It's big and brassy" for TUBA), and 11-Down ("'60s do also called a 'natural'" for AFRO). I know it drives some constructors nuts, but I thoroughly enjoy finding new ways of cluing little words that appear in puzzles all the time.

David was kind enough to put up with me, a slightly demented 18-year old freshman roommate interested in all sorts of bizarre experiments. As an example, I set up trials to determine how long I could go without sleeping. (Hallucinating began at hour 45 and I fell asleep in the dorm hallway at hour 50.) Needless to say, people drew mustaches on me.

This grid was challenging, since the high theme density made it near impossible to incorporate long downs. I used to be fine having only a little snazzy fill in a puzzle, but these days I hate letting a puzzle go unless there are at least four nice non-theme entries inside the grid. As a solver, I highly value sparkling fill, so I always keep that front and center in my mind when I construct.

Since using long downs wasn't possible, I had to incorporate long across fill. Typically that would bother me because those answers might be mistaken for theme material, but in this case I didn't mind since the themers were so long (15/11/15/11/15) that they stand out on their own.

Unfortunately, with all the constraints, the only option was to put long across fill in the NE and SW corners. I typically don't like splitting rows 1 and 15 into two words apiece, because three words apiece is so much easier to fill cleanly. But in this case, it was the only way I felt we could add some sparkle.

I tried several hundred alternatives for each corner, and I'm never happy to have a partial (I LAY), but I thought it was a reasonable trade-off to get such goodness as 'NUFF SAID and ASIAN FLU (I find the pan-Asian financial crisis of the late 1990's incredibly interesting and useful to study, in hopes of preventing future outbreaks). I was also happy to give LAILA ALI some props, as well as Darren SHAN, the author of the Cirque du Freak series. I can only hope to someday have one-tenth his success as an author.

Fun to collaborate. I'm particularly interested in increasing diversity within constructors, so please contact me (jeffchen1972 at gmail dot com) if you'd like to break into the most fascinating hobby in the world. (And you're willing to work dozens of hours with little pay!)