ON THE UP AND UP

Tracy Gray lives in Sparks, Md., near Baltimore, where she and her husband own and operate a lawn-and-landscaping business. She made her Times debut in 2010. Tracy always includes fresh, colorful vocabulary in her puzzles. Her last Sunday one, two years ago, is the only Times crossword ever to contain OVEN TIMER, RIVER THAMES, MALL OF AMERICA, MADAME TUSSAUD'S, QDOBA or LEFT AJAR.

This is her 27^th puzzle for The Times.

The inspiration for this puzzle came from my title "On the Up and Up" which my crossword brain parsed into two parts: "On the Up" ("___ UP" phrases literally going upward in the grid) and "and Up" (+ the inferred UP).

Phrases with the pattern *UP were more than plentiful on XWord Info (over 2,000!), so I knew I needed to tighten (up) my concept big time. Coincidentally, my bank was advertising STEP UP CDs at the time, and that's when I saw the semordnilap STEP/PETS, and I was off to the races, looking for UP phrases that spelled a legitimate word going down in the grid. I then further constrained my theme by getting rid of phrases with articles, prepositions, and conjunctions such as LIVE UP TO THE HYPE and KEEP UP WITH THE JONESES, although I did make an exception with the colorful KISS AND MADE UP theme entry.

With only 88 theme squares, I was concerned that my theme wasn't dense enough and tried to fit in MOP UP OPERATION and PIN-UP CALENDARS at 41 and 91-across, respectively, but my aesthetic brain said no - due to the ugly build (up) of black squares in certain areas.

Hope you enjoy the solve!

Solvers sometimes flood me with questions about certain theme types, and today's is near the top of that list. It's a tough call — do you make the conceit blatantly easy by circling the relevant tricksy entries? Or do you risk solvers not understanding what's going on, leaving with a feeling of frustration (that they then take out on me)?

Honestly, I don't write all the puzzles! Nor does a computer!

Tried and true example of this theme type, which I've seen playing off both UP and DOWN. I appreciated three aspects of Tracy's theme execution:

1. Each shaded word is both a real entry, as well as a fine ___ UP phrase when reversed.
2. The shaded words all come at the start or end of phrases, never the middle.
3. There's a nearly 50/50 mix of starts and ends. While there would be more consistency if Tracy had put them all at the beginnings, that would have flooded the left side of the grid with shaded squares, making for an unappealing visual.

I wasn't a fan of all her themer choices, though — HIGH-SPEED DIAL-UP in particular. I asked a couple of IT friends, and they all gave me that sneery eye roll that defines the industry. (No bitterness about Centurylink and its intensely horrible customer service, not me!)

REVERSE PHONE LOOKUP is better. At least it Googles well (millions of hits when in quotes). I wouldn't use it to seed a themeless, though; more a utilitarian term, like BITWISE OPERATORS or DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURIBILITY.

Along with SIT UP BENCH — we call it an inclined bench at my gym — and PIN-UP GIRL — I'm glad it wasn't a dude who wrote this puzzle! — I wasn't wild about the themers as a whole.

It's not easy to come up with sizzling, long phrases with some of these ___ UP phrases. Can you think of anything else for DIAL UP besides DIAL-UP MODEM? So this would have played out better on a Thursday, allowing for snappier themer selections. "(KOOL) IN THE SKY!" (it's a bird …) would have been awesome.

Excellent gridwork helped keep up my interest, thankfully. Hardly a blip in the short fill, which is tough to do with so many L-shaped themers — some of them crossing! A couple of long goodies like BEER GARDENS, PRESS PASSES, BEE STING, BASE TAN, EGO TRIP, TORN MCL, too. High-quality craftsmanship can go a long ways toward retaining solvers' attention.