New York Times, Wednesday, August 21, 2013

First, thanks to Jeff and XWord Info for presenting this forum. As I recall, the idea for this one just popped in my head, as they sometimes do, and I thought it would be fun to give solvers a hidden-word puzzle-in-a-puzzle. I was very fortunate to come up with the theme entries, especially those that contained TAN twice. After working out the placement of these theme entries within the grid, I got even more lucky to find some nice fill that could string two or more of these together; getting AUSTRIA to cross all three in the middle really worked very nicely.

Will offered a number of suggestions, which led to some reworking of a few areas, and this resulted in a nicer and cleaner final version. I then drafted up the clues which I aimed to be fresh and lively. Besed on the theme, Will thought it would be good to run during beach season. I hope you all enjoy! I guess we'll just have to WAIT AND SEE!

The large amount of theme material in this puzzle impacted the grid in some unappealing ways. Balancing quantity of theme and quality of fill is always tricky. At 35A, the constructor had SERAL ("Of ecological stages"). I thought SURAL was better, but probably not by much.

Such a shame that constructor extraordinaire NATAN Last wasn't in on this one. =]

Great concept for a theme. I really liked the idea of having two instances of the word TAN making for a literal TAN line, and the three 15-letter theme answers do this perfectly. Very neat! It's a nice bonus that each of these answers is a lively entry in itself.

To expand on Will's point, not only are there five long theme answers, but an additional four instances of TAN (or NAT) hidden vertically, plus the TAN/LINE revealer. This is a gigantic set of constraints, much higher than usual. It's impressive to see so many TAN instances, but since there's no explicit rationale for having 14 of them, I wanted to see if there was another arrangement which might allow for cleaner fill while keeping the nice theme concept.

Some searching turned up AUGUSTA NATIONAL as another grid-spanner having a "TAN line" (two connected TANs). I like the idea of having four 15-letter theme entries that do this, with no other TANs present, something like this grid. It's not nearly as ambitious as Jonathan's construction, but to Will's point, it makes for a different balance of quantity of theme/quality of fill. Some might like it more, some might like it less.

A final note: how incredible would it be if the TAN lines made some sort of recognizable shape, perhaps by placing the theme entries in a pinwheel arrangement? I don't think the Gray Lady is ready for the shape I had in mind, though. =]