New York Times, Wednesday, October 20, 2021

This is my second puzzle in the New York Times, but it was the first one accepted. I sent it in while I was still filling my grids manually using an online crossword maker and submitting them in an envelope. So, this being a puzzle by a novice constructor, there are high points and low points. MARRIED and SAID I DO crossing is great, as are LAVERNE / COX, CHIA PET, and HENDRIX, but I don't think solvers need the nearly identical German words for 'one' and 'ice'. And while SILENT D (I think) was saved by the cluing, it's pretty arbitrary.

I do think the theme holds up better than the fill. ORANGE-RED was fun to discover. I couldn't include ORBITING in the grid, but it was equally fun to think of potential clues for that too. The theme's one downside is, since it involves wordplay over the entirety of each theme answer, those answers will tend to be short. I considered adding even shorter answers, such as "Who's your favorite ghostbuster? Winston ..." and "Who's your favorite composer? Liszt ..." (can you figure out what the latter options are?), but I was still in my phase where theme answers needed to be the longest across answers, and I can't imagine the effect on the fill if I had gone down that path.

In sum, I'm happy this puzzle got accepted because I was proud of its unique approach to a fairly simple theme, but I could have gone further with it.

(Answer: Winston OREGON; Liszt ORBACH)

Neat finds! As a former "Star Wars" fanboy (pre-"Phantom Menace") I'm ashamed to say I never thought of LANDO in ORLANDO. There have been so many space-addition crosswords over the years. It's refreshing to experience a novel one.

Great idea to feature ORANGE RED = OR ANGERED in the middle. The multi-space-shifting is some Matrix-esque maneuvering.

I wasn't as hot on ORALIST. While I admire the transmogrification to OR A LIST, I don't use (or even see) the word ORALIST nearly as much as the others.

Regular readers would be stunned if I didn't write code to figure out other possibilities, so here are the additional results that twelve lines of code spat out:

• OR ANGINA (yikes, no one wants to hear about medical conditions)
• OR ANTES (who?)
• OR BISON (any Street Fighter fans out there?)
• OR BITER (thankfully no biters in this house — yet)
• OR ESTES (who, and who?)
• OR MANDY (whatever the question, the answer is Patinkin!)

I might gone with OR BISON over ORALIST, but David's choice has merit.

With a 7/7/9/7/7 themer layout, the 7s are often best in rows 4 and 12 — putting them in rows 3 and 13 forces big corners, chock full of 7s. That's not always an issue, but when you're already splitting the grid top to bottom with a middle 9, the corners become hard to fill with both color and clarity. I love CHIA PET and HENDRIX. I'm glad David called out EIS and EINS out himself. TXT and EXT are gettable, but most editors would at least ding both.

Kicking off the puzzle with EMS crossing ESO BESO is tough, too.

However, the lower right corner is beautiful! Not a drop of crossword glue, and LAVERNE / COX to boot. Maybe you don't know the OitNB star, but it's not hard to piece together two names that you've likely seen before in other contexts. And if you're not a fan, there's LEONINE and TRAVAIL as bonuses. Amusing to juxtapose TRAVAIL with STRESS FREE, too.

Perhaps some layout tweaks could have improved the execution, but overall, a good product. Memorable parsing theme, too — OR LANDO will be frozen into the carbonite of my mind.