New York Times, Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Very excited for my NYT debut! Big thanks to my mentor Myles Callum, and to the editing team who helped me greatly improve on my original idea.

I constructed my first "crossword puzzles" by hand on deployment in Afghanistan to keep my Marines entertained back in 2012. Needless to say, they were terrible and broke every rule in the book. Who knew they had to be symmetrical? Or shouldn't have typos? I've been constructing properly(ish) for about a year and a half now and am excited to have a new lifelong hobby that I love.

While I'm quite happy with how clean this grid came out, I've learned a lot in the last ten months since this was accepted. I would love to have more sparkly, long, non-themers than LIMA BEAN and DRY GOODS. Not too scintillating, in my opinion.

The editorial team (thankfully) changed most of my cluing, but one they did keep, which I'm thrilled about is 1-Across. My mom was my biggest inspiration and champion, but she passed away shortly before I received my first crossword acceptance. She was a shoe designer who got her start at Bass so that being my first entry ever in the NYT gives me the warm and fuzzies.

I've had the pleasure of working with Chase on a few crosswords, so it's great to see his NYT debut. I enjoyed the play on various typographies. At first, they seemed inconsistent, since STRESS in STRESS EATING serves as a verb (the clue kookily ordering you to stress "eating"), while BOLD in BOLD PROPOSAL acts an adjective (the clue wackily describing the "proposal" as bold), but I realized that BOLD can also function as a verb. It's not perfect, but it works.

I did wonder about the A in STRIKE A POSE, since it was the only themer containing an A. Why not STRIKE THREE, STRIKE FORCE, or STRIKE ZONES? Ultimately though, few solvers will care about this sort of minor detail. Darn kids, not caring about minutia!

I rarely notice 3x3 chunks of fill, but that ROLO YOLO made me laugh. Why hasn't Nestle used this as an ad slogan yet?

TARE HALE had a similar letter pattern duplication, but that wasn't nearly as fun. Let's tare the hale patient on the scale, doc!

Okay, maybe that is kind of fun.

I agree with Chase on LIMA BEAN and DRY GOODS, neither that exciting. This particular layout doesn't provide much flexibility for those slots, since they have to run through two themers apiece, though adding black squares at O of ONSET and I of ROSSI likely would have helped. Chase has developed tremendously over the past year; it'd be interesting to see what he could do with the execution today.

This one reminded me of a typography puzzle that I loved — I enjoyed that one's focus. Italics, bold, and strikethrough go together, but spacing felt like a "which of these things is not like the other." Maybe ALLCAPS would have been better? Still, a playful debut.