New York Times, Wednesday, January 11, 2023

I don't watch a ton of TV anymore, but when I do, I often watch crime/courtroom procedurals, so I get a lot of lying-under-oath moments, which inspired this puzzle. It was a tough fill, and I went through a lot of iterations. One version had only three LIEs and then the revealer UNDEROATH ("Bad place to lie, this puzzle notwithstanding"), but it didn't quite work.

Then I realized that LIES/UNDER/OATH could work across a row of the grid, and suddenly what looked like it was going nowhere seemed to have a chance. I first tried LIES/UNDER/OATH in the middle (row 8), but that failed quickly, so I moved it to the bottom.

My favorite cutting-room-floor entries were MEGADETH and FANDANGO. This puzzle was a nice reminder that sometimes you can't just knock out a puzzle in a few hours and that an interesting idea is worth stewing over — it took almost four months from my first version to the version that I sent the Times. I hope that everyone enjoyed solving the puzzle as much as I enjoyed making it.

I love making crossword sausage. There's so much blood and guts that solvers never see, words crammed into tight spaces, yanked back out and packed back in. The best sausages come out spicy and smooth, and Victor's was more Aidell's than Kroger's.

Stacking four LIEs under different OATHs isn't difficult when you can work with shorties like GOSH and friendly letters in EGAD, but putting in the revealer opens up a whole can of crossworms. Breaking up LIES / UNDER / OATH makes it so fragmented. I like that a revealer containing UNDER is under everything else, though.

I might have enjoyed something more cryptic: LIES tucked underneath OATH. Maybe that's too tricksy for some Wednesday solvers — the revealer cluing would have to be spot on — but how meta would that be!

Editors usually insist on a max word count of 78 for a 15x15, and that's not just an arbitrary number. Higher than that, and you tend to make sacrifices. Maybe it's colorful bonuses, maybe it's grid connectivity, maybe it's a start-and-stop solve filled with too many short entries. I don't mind Victor's decision to go to 80 words, but the solving feng shui suffered, the two long diagonals of black squares chopping things up.

I'd love to see if removing the block between SAC and ODE was possible. Tough call, though, since there are already some tough crossings like ELGAR / REL.

This type of "stacked literal themers" is more interesting when the words change, so having different OATHs was great. I would have loved a FIB, TALE, YARN worked in for variety, too.