DOWNRIGHT TRICKY!

This puzzle had two distinct geneses. The first was CHIVALRY IS DEAD, which I had liked as a potential entry for, oh, 7 or 8 years. 14-letter entries can sit on the shelf a long time. At some point, much more recently, CONSIDER IT DONE caught my eye as another nice 14, and I thought of pairing it with CHIVALRY IS DEAD in a themeless. I think I actually started a grid and then noticed the C.I.D. connection.

The other thing I had in mind for quite some while was that feeling you get solving. You know something is wrong, and then you realize "Oh, it's a rebus!" and then everything starts working properly. I wanted to construct a puzzle where that has to happen twice — first when you think it's a rebus, and then when you realize it isn't. There would have to be a way that the themers were too long to fit, but then ended up somewhere else.

So when the CID part jumped out at me, a bunch of things came together at once. CID and CHIVALRY IS DEAD both got me thinking of knights. And the knight in chess moves like an L, ... "L" CID ... and hence the puzzle. My original title was "Knight Moves," which Matt Gaffney later used for a different gimmick, so I suggested to Will to change it to "Knight Shift." Will's title is probably a clearer hint ... hope you all remembered to look at the title before you started.

I lit onto MADE A DECISION pretty early on, to disguise the DEAD part. Then when I realized that I'VE MADE A DECISION could go in the middle and allow for symmetric placement of my two theme seed entries, I had my basic structure. I was lucky enough to hang a few more L's off the center entry and get some pretty complicated interlock to work out. The roughest section to fill was that little knot around HSIA/AAAA/EVIE. A lot of not-greatness there, but I could live with it. A special THANK U to Alanis, without whom I would have had to rip up the whole thing.

The area that was surprisingly challenging was the bottom of CONSIDER IT DONE. I needed ???DONE but I didn't want DONE in the answer and I had ONE elsewhere, so wanted to avoid using it again. That pretty much left me with CONDONE, making that section rather knotty, especially since I wanted the revealer next door. After all that, I somehow missed the dupe of LEG PAD and PADDED BRA, which I just spotted a couple of days ago. But I guess it never hurts to have a little extra PADding.

Nice change of pace today, six theme answers, all three words starting with C I D and "turning a corner" to create an L-shape. All with the revealer... EL CID! Clever. I'm not sure how many people know El Cid but he's certainly a historical person of note.

I liked the quirkiness of this one. At first I thought it was a bit out there to have these giant L shapes in the puzzle, especially since they're not symmetrical (see the highlights in the grid below), but I do like seeing things I've never seen before. Perhaps it might have been nice to get more thematic material about EL CID, given how historically important he was? Although, I searched through the wikipedia article and found roughly zero recognizable snippets that could be used as a crossword entry. "Ludriq al-Kanbiyatur" doesn't exactly scream CROSSWORD-WORTHY ENTRY!

As with all of Byron's work, it's well executed. It might seem like this one would be a bit easier than normal given there are only six themers, but the fact that the L-bend is hidden inside another entry (the DEAD in CHIVALRY is DEAD is hidden in IVE MA(DE A D)ECISION, e.g.) makes the construction quite challenging. But Byron finds a nice layout that allows for a lot of snazzy fill in chunks of the puzzle. Note the ICE CUBE / MOSH PIT section up top — beautiful stuff in an area Byron left himself with just one constraint. It all starts with the layout.

It's pretty amazing just how much good fill Byron manages to work in, actually. Often we get Sundays with a single pair of long down entries. Byron gives us I HAD A HUNCH / OFF BALANCE, SALT MINING / SPIKED ACES (not totally sure what those are, but they sound cool — NEWSFLASH: astute reader Martin Herbach tells me they're SPIKEDACES; aha!), even SPARE KEY / SEA HOLLY. And that's just to start! He also works in nice fill in the across direction (kids, don't try this at home). Fitting in MS PAC MAN and PADDED BRA, along with HOG CALLING and BLIND BID, it just doesn't stop. I almost gave this puzzle the POW based on execution and fun solve alone. The expertise shines through here, starting with a smart layout and ending with such care and feeding, balancing strong long fill and the desire to keep ugly short stuff out. It's not perfect (I struggled with the ESTIVATE / AAAA / EVIE section) but overall it's a strong product.

Even some strong clues. [Stoker of fear?] is something I've seen variants of before. I also liked [What might give you a big head?] for AFRO. And my favorite (which took a while to figure out even after putting in the letters was the clue for MANCAVE. It might feel a little tortured to some, given that "coordinates" is a bit of a stretch in order to misdirect, but the XY coordinates have to do with the XY chromosomes males carry, not XY coordinates on a plot. The Facebook "like button" had a nice repurposing for the IKE clue too.

An innovative idea, perhaps with a bit of untapped potential? That's up for debate, but it'd be tough to argue with how well the grid is executed.