BYE-LINES

I have been creating puzzles since 1994. Over the years, I've been able to place puzzles with most publishers, including having seven or eight daily puzzles in the Times. Perhaps ten years ago, I decided to have a go at placing a puzzle in the Sunday Times. I've tried to do so once or twice a year since then, failing every time. Although I had sent what I consider my best work each time, I have the sense that I was not very close to acceptance in any case. After each puzzle was rejected, in most cases I was able to place it or another puzzle with the same theme elsewhere, I started to think that I should give up the idea of placing a Sunday puzzle in the Times. However, I hadn't quite gotten there yet. I do have ideas for puzzles pop into my head pretty regularly and, being retired, have time to work with them.

In this particularly case, somehow I started thinking about the way different ended, such as Walter Cronkite's "That's The Way It Is". I wondered if I could come up with a good set of famous show closings as the theme entries for a 21x puzzle. I thought of different ways to do this and decided to take a chance and ask Will if he might be interested in any of them. I have not attempted to dialogue with Will on any of my other submissions to him either before or since knowing it is asking a lot of him to do so given the volume of submissions he receives. Anyhow, the theme did interest him, and we had some dialogue. That eventually led to this puzzle, but not before my first attempt to do this was rejected. I believe there are three reasons why I was finally successful with this version. First, Will did like the theme. In fact, he is entitled to most of the credit for the key theme entry (which entry will be apparent to the solver). Second, I was able to do this puzzle with 134 entries. Finally, I was able to avoid entries that Will considered unacceptable.

In my years of puzzle writing, I've had more than 4,000 puzzles published, including crosswords and more than 25 other types of word puzzles. I'm 3½ years into full retirement from my career business and created puzzles to stay young. If you like this puzzle, please check out my ebook of puzzles book on the free Puzzazz app.

It is hard to create a Sunday puzzle. Working with a 21x21 grid and a maximum of 140 almost always causes me to tear my hair out (what's left of it, anyway). Each time I've dabbled with 138 word grids I've shied away, going back to the safety of the 140 worder. That goes doubly or triply so for the 136 word construction, which is exponentially harder to execute on. Today, Alan gives us a 134 word puzzle today, one of the lowest word count puzzles in the Shortz era. Audacious!

The theme is straightforward today, five well-known "bye-lines", phrases famous people said as they were leaving. Clever title. I liked the idea paired with the title and would have liked to see a few more theme examples. I'LL BE BACK comes to mind immediately, as does GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK. I'm sure there are others. Fun to think of famous parting words.

This puzzle falls into the category of Will's experimentation with less theme density and a lower word count. 134 words is pretty impressive, but I for one don't care about record setting unless it leads directly to solver pleasure. So does this puzzle achieve that? On some levels, yes. The fact that the puzzle includes so much long fill is impressive, and that factor can really add to puzzle enjoyment. There's a lot of good stuff here, including IPOD NANO, IN UTERO, PLAYS UP, BAD TRIP, SURF CITY, SET BAIL, RAT TAILS, even IDI AMIN in his full. Pretty fun to see all that snazzy content.

However, a lot of the fill is in that 3-7 letter length, and much of that isn't exciting, more "ballast fill"; glue that holds the puzzle together. I enjoyed the idea of the theme and uncovering some of the longer fill, but encountering entries such as EPATHA, especially crossing ASAS took away from my solving pleasure. Also, I felt like I was solving a giant themeless puzzle, which could be great except that I personally get tired out mentally toward the end of a hard themeless without many marquee answers. Stretching that experience into a 21x dimension left me awfully worn-out toward the end.

Overall, interesting experiment with the "less theme, less words" approach. Seeing a few examples of this has helped tune my impression of what I would like to see in the future: at least six theme entries (or five grid-spanners), with more 8+ letter fill. I think it would be awesome to get a few more puzzles which aren't as theme-dense as usual, but offer more of the impact that snazzy themelesses deliver what with their fresh stacks of 8+ letter entries.

FYI, if you hit the "Analyze this puzzle" button at the very bottom of this page, you'll get all sorts of stats about this puzzle. No more drudgery of counting things manually!