New York Times, Wednesday, September 17, 2014

C.C.:

I'd like to share the first email exchanges I had with Don regarding this theme:

C.C.: "Don, can we put BEE? words on top of various flowers and have POLLINATION as title?

Don: "You are too funny. Are we talking weekday or Sunday puzzle? Better yet, find flowers that can be masked, like ASTER in EASTER, etc. This may require circles. I suppose we should look at a list of flowers first to see if that is possible. There is IRIS in IRISH, ROSE in PROSE. Maybe that is all we need. I don't think we can do a big puzzle with this theme. Having three flowers embedded with BEE words above and POLLINATION in the grid is enough. Want to give this a try? ..."

This is how Don rolls, always improving on a simple idea I have and making things happen.

DON:

I will add that there seems to be a synergy to collaborating on an idea. Most likely, neither of us would have come up with this idea, but by throwing it around, we see things that we otherwise would not see.

Great concept today, a neat a-ha moment upon reaching POLLINATION. After seeing IRIS and ASTER, I had a ho-hum feeling, expecting some sort of "hidden flowers" revealer. But to go back and see BEEs atop the flowers was really cool. I love being surprised by a crossword, and that was a delightful discovery.

It's tricky to execute this type of "X atop Y" type of theme, as your difficulty factor goes up by a factor of maybe 1.5. Check out where EYEBALL is — see how constrained that entry is? Fixing two letters within one entry makes things tough, fixing three letters takes away a lot of flexibility. Luckily, E, B, and A are fairly common letters, and that ??EBA?? does allow some options like ICEBATH, IKEBANA, CUE BALL, etc. Nice way to work through a tough section chock full of constraints.

The constraints do cause some difficulty in the north and south regions, though. A 6x3 region is already difficult — there's a reason why most constructors stay away from wide north and south regions like this — and when you constrain things yet more, you end up with combinations like REDOSE and SSE. Either in isolation can be overlooked; crossing each other is not great. I can more easily overlook a lone SNEE in the south, for example.

Finally, I appreciate C.C. and Don's efforts in giving us good long fill. With a highly-constrained theme like this, I wouldn't expect more than two pieces of long fill. But check out the parallel long downs in the NE and SW. I love SWEET TALK as an entry, and getting TENNESSEE isn't too shabby. Usually these parallel long downs make the surrounding fill tough to get clean. But I like everything around that region. People might complain about ENTs, but when you help the Fellowship of the Ring conquer the very embodiment of evil, I think you're entitled to a little crossword love.