New York Times, Thursday, January 11, 2018

I had the idea to do a play on line breaks a while ago, but the extent of that was pretty much "line break puzzle?" in my Notes app. Then one day I was sifting through said Notes app (which is just a bunch of half-baked theme ideas and things I want to add to my word list) and thought some more about it, eventually arriving at the idea of repurposing the hyphen from the line break as part of the crossing downs. Then I thought, hey, all the broken lines should be things you say when you're interrupted! Then I thought, hey, the remnants of the broken lines should still form valid entries! Then I thought, hey, no way in hell that'll work. But sometimes you just get lucky (though the brainstorm on this one was long).

I've really gotta stop making puzzles with crossing theme entries because they force a lot of constraints on the grid. In addition, this puzzle has six theme entries of length 3-5, which probably don't seem like they'd be tough to incorporate, but they do force specific black squares, as well as demanding longer entries in the fill. It took a while to put together, but I am happy with the end product (absent ABLUSH). Otherwise, I'm just happy to have gotten wordplay dependent on both fixed income products and the term "body shot" into the same crossword; I'm easy to please like that.

Lines from someone who was interrupted … and the lines themselves are interrupted! Novel idea, using hyphens for line breaks. PLEASE LET ME FIN-ISH was perfect, as it's so apt to the theme, and ISH ends up being a perfectly fine crossword entry in its own right.

DO I LOOK LIKE I'M D-ONE didn't feel as strong, as the phrase didn't hit my ear very well, and it felt odd to hyphenate a single-syllable word.

QUIET I WAS SPEAK-ING was somewhere in the middle for me — I liked the more natural hyphenation, but the QUIET at the front felt added on for bulk.

Strong choices in the crossing hyphenated words. HI-C, A-Z, NO-NO all solid. I would have liked some longer ones, but due to the layout of the theme — three (almost!) grid-spanning themers, that wouldn't have been possible.

Would have also been nice to get a fourth themer, but again, that's not possible since the crossing entries have to be in the far right column.

Given that there could only be three long themers, Sam did well to use his freedom and flexibility to incorporate a ton of great fill. THE BIBLE, JELLY ROLLS, TALKS TRASH, OPEN A TAB, CAL POLY, MRI SCAN = fantastic work. When you're forced to keep theme density low, this type of great snazziness in fill is what you should be aiming at.

And to do it with just a bit of HWY, SQIN was great. Great attention to detail left me with a feeling of elegance in craftsmanship.

Fun concept. If all the themers had worked as perfectly for me as PLEASE LET ME FIN-ISH, this would have been the POW!