New York Times, Wednesday, May 30, 2018

SANDE: It's a real thrill to publish my first NYT puzzle. I've been solving these things for over 60 years, first cutting my teeth on the NY Post, then graduating to the Times, in the days when an ANOA would paddle his PROA to a STOA in GOA. The puzzles have changed so much since then. Used to be that if you could find a word hidden away in an old edition of the OED, Britannica or Gray's Anatomy, it was "legal." No brand names, no hip expressions were allowed.

I submitted two puzzles in 1972 when Will Weng was the editor. The daily had a bad word in it, BULTACO (a Spanish motorcycle). I knew the word wasn't legal, but I was hoping that Mr. Weng wouldn't notice it: fat chance!

Decades later, after retiring as a faculty member at Florida State, I brought an idea for a Sunday puzzle to Nancy Salomon, through cruciverb.com. She passed me along to Jeff, and we're now collaborating on our third puzzle. My advice to solvers considering trying their lot at construction: if you love waiting for Fridays and Saturdays, you'll find that constructing your own is like having the hardest Saturday you've ever faced, open and challenging you — all day long. There's nothing like it. But I do recommend working with an experienced constructor: you have a lot more to learn than you think.

This puzzle was a pleasure to work on because the Scrabble theme opened up so many possibilities. The theme is multi-layered. First, there are four racks of mixed-up "tiles," which when solved announce the flow of the game: PLAYERS ARRANGE JUMBLED LETTERS. Second, there's bag of mixed "tiles" (anagrams) in the center section. Finally, the two reveal clues tell you that it's a SCRABBLE game and that there's a MIXED BAG in the middle. So much going on!

Sande comes up with some of the most creative ideas of any of my collaborators. I liked his initial concept of doing something Scrabble-related in a crossword. Having four "racks" around a scrabble board, plus a "bag" made out of black squares (look at the center of the grid again!)? That was pretty good.

Then he came up with the idea of TILES inside the bag, mixed up into STILE and ISLET. Even better!

But I felt like we had to have Scrabble-esque words in the four racks, not what he proposed: any four seven-letter words that would help us produce good fill. I worried that this would kill the idea. Ah well, lots of ideas need to die a natural death.

Then he came back with PLAYERS ANAGRAM JUMBLED LETTERS. Oh so perfect! Now it was just a matter of working up a grid skeleton.

Nothing good by revision 10. Tricky lengths to work with, considering we had to build around that central "bag."

Revision 30? Still flailing.

Somewhere around 50, things started to look up.

Back down by rev 60.

Finally, I thought, what if we punted on a 15x15 grid? 16x15 or 14x16 is no problem for the NYT, but those didn't help. Finally, I tested out a weird 13x17 on a lark and bingo! It all fell into place.

After 40 more revisions.

Thankfully, Will thought he could bend some rules to the get the odd shape to work with his syndication partners. What a relief! Revision number 101, clued and filed as final.

The sight of a single Scrabble TILE will fill me with Pavlovian shudders from now on.