New York Times, Thursday, January 28, 2021

What a thrill to be making my New York Times debut today! I'm an elementary school music teacher based in Medford, MA. I've been solving for a couple of decades and began constructing recently. Besides publishing in other venues, I regularly create crosswords and cryptics for my blog, Square Pursuit.

Today's puzzle is a relatively early effort, though it was preceded by a string of polite rejections from the NYT. I love this kind of literary, surreal humor! While I know that additive wordplay and clue-heavy theming aren't for everybody, especially in Thursday puzzles, it was a pleasure to make, and I'm grateful that Will and the team preserved the goofiness. Though I've become a stronger grid maker since then, I think the mid-length, flowy fill suits the puzzle nicely.

I want to thank Kelly Petitt and Katie Weir for taking me to the ACPT in 2019, where I first started to get ideas about making puzzles. Despite the very warm welcome I received that weekend, I was too shy to ask for constructing help for a long time. After making this puzzle, I mustered up the courage to start my blog and became part of a wonderful crossword community. To those I've met in the past year, I value and appreciate you! To anybody out there who wants to talk about solving or making puzzles, I hope you'll get in touch with me! This is so much more fun to do with friends.

I'm not sure I can explain this theme. Do I even understand it? I'm not sure that I do. Or should I say, that I do-ily?

Now that that unsuccessful joke is out of the way, I think I like this theme. Maybe even a lot.

First, the explanation. Start with a regular phrase, add ILY to its last word, and use that final word to describe the rest of the phrase — ideally, changing the rest of the phrase's meaning. ALL THAT JAZZ works well since ALL THAT has a (sort of) different sense when taken by itself. Cluing "all that" in a jazzy way is amusing. Think of it as "ALL THAT, described JAZZILY."

THE LAST WORD becomes THE LAST, WORDILY, and its clue defines "the last" in a less-than-succinct way. This one doesn't work as well since THE LAST doesn't change meaning. Still, I enjoyed the long-winded clue, something that a normal writer would never set out to work toward, especially in a situation where brevity, or the lack of conciseness or extraneous detail, therefore, might cause readers to wander, in avoidance thereof—

Hey, get back here!

I mostly enjoyed the gridwork, aside from a killer AT-AT / TARTT crossing. I do think TARTT is crossworthy, but it's a tough one given that so many other first letters could seem reasonable, like DARTT, GARTT, MARTT, etc. And as much as I like "Star Wars," AT-AT as an entry is about as sturdy as their curiously skinny legs. What sort of mechanical engineer designs a walker that can be tripped by string? On Darth Vader's Twitter feed: SMH (shaking my helmet).

I would have liked a few more marquee long bonuses besides A AVERAGE, but mid-length ALGIERS, YOGA MAT, AND SUCH added a great deal to my solve. Most people won't remember RIVEN, but I have some fond memories of my deep immersion.

Not the most exemplary theme, especially given my preference for tricky, rule-breaking Thursdays, but I appreciated the novelty. It's neat to see what new constructors bring to the crossworld.

"Penultimate" is a great word, but as English continues to erode, I mean evolve, it's in danger of losing precision. It means "second to last" but (sloppy) people sometimes use it to mean the very last. That makes jokes like "post-penultimate" or clues like 20 Across lose all sense.

Flanders and Swann famously included the lyric, "Then there flashed through her mind what her mother had said, With her antepenultimate breath" in their cautionary song Have Some Madeira, M'Dear.