New York Times, Monday, June 29, 2020

I wanted to avoid phrases where the circled letters had two possible placements, so GOOD GOD, ROOT ROT, and MANAGEMENT AGENT were out, as well as APPASSIONATA SONATA, which also had the problem of being too many letters. Good ones that I didn't use included LARD LAD [Donut shop on "The Simpsons"], TOTO TOO [Question that Dorothy asks Glinda (and Glinda's answer)], SHADOW SHOW, MIRACLE MILE, ENDURANCE RACE, ESTIMATED TIME, FLOWERING FERN, and WRESTLING RING, and the too-long ones ASTONISHING THING, PRESIDENTIAL SEAL, ADMINISTRATIVE STATE, and INFINITESIMALLY SMALL.

There were some nice ones with three-letter second words, but ones longer than seven total letters seemed less interesting: ABSTRACT ART, BARGAIN BIN, BOTANY BAY, CARPENTER ANT, DEADBEAT DAD, TERMINALLY ILL, and TEXAS TEA.

Did you ever notice that A S P is contained within SHAKESPEARE? That there is a great murder mystery in the making. Untimely death due to fever from too much drinking, my asp.

Like Shakespeare, we constructors are an obsessive bunch. A majority of the time, I'm only pretending to listen to people, simply nodding to cover up the whirr of gears as the crossword ideas spin about. I'd love to trace the firing of synapses that led Peter to this concept. I've seen many like it, including full words within another word of a phrase, plays on contained letters, and awesome "kangaroo words," but I haven't quite seen this.

Editor of the "blazingly hard" Fireball crossword, Peter tends toward tough fill. I don't know that ABSALOM crossing IM PEI is unfair, but it is ripe for newer solvers to make a frustrating mistake. PRITZKER PRIZE is better, since even though ZYDECO is a toughie, there's another check on the Z from the nature of the theme.

You might wonder why HEROS isn't spelled with an extra E, like HEROES? Or what the clue means? It's clever, a HERO sandwich being (literally) a long lunch. Hopefully, that doesn't go over too many Monday solvers' heads.

I enjoyed the novelty of the concept, although seeing how many other phrases there are made it less interesting — there's something appealing about a given set of themers being the only ones possible. Maybe it could have been tightened up somehow. Perhaps choosing a related set of themers, or even something as simple as all ones starting with the same letter.

It also would have been great to find some appropriate revealer, a raison d'être to give it a more of a "wow!" than a "huh, that's a curious letter pattern observation." How neat would it be to play on WHAT'S IN A NAME?!