New York Times, Thursday, November 10, 2016

JON: I was stumped trying to find a good revealer answer for this J-HOOK theme. I briefly considered JAY HOOK, the pitcher who gave the New York Mets their first franchise win in 1962, but decided that would be too obscure.

Then I remembered a clever Monday NYT puzzle by William I. Johnston from 9/9/2002: the theme involved the letter L, and all of the black squares were arranged in L shapes. What if I did a similar thing for the letter J, and used the "grid art" as the revealer?

To make that concept work with my theme answers, I had to expand the grid to 16x15. But I found the resulting grid very difficult to fill, so Will and Joel suggested the possibility of my bringing in Jeff Chen as a co-constructor. As it happens, I had been looking for an opportunity to collaborate with Jeff, and I jumped at the chance. Jeff was very receptive and a pleasure to work with, and we had a fun back-and-forth deciding on the remaining fill and then brainstorming on the clues.

In case anyone is wondering, the fact that we both have "J" names is just a happy coincidence.

Enjoy!

JEFF: I had been admiring the clever ideas in Jon's previous puzzles, so it was a pleasure to hear from him, asking if I could help with a puzzle grid after several back and forths with Will. Even better, I really liked his idea of Js representing hooks — another of Jon's neat concepts that stick to "one letter per square." It's so hard to innovate while adhering to that convention, but Jon's done it so many times.

Really fun to work with a member of the J club! (I work with Jim Horne and am married to Jill Denny.)

What a bear of a construction — all those Js + the constraint of every black square chunk having to be J-shaped = BLAAARGH! Thankfully, the engineer in me loved how well the construction process lent itself to a methodical approach:

• The J blocks on the top and bottom could be shifted side to side into one of two acceptable positions, for a total of four combinations. But one combination resulted a two-letter word, so I eliminated it. OPTIONS: 3.
• Two J blocks in the center could be flipped 180 degrees. OPTIONS: 2.
• The first and last themers could be swapped. OPTIONS: 2.
• The middle themers could be swapped. OPTIONS: 2.

From there, it was a matter of systematically testing each of 3x2x2x2 =24 possibilities. There was something so satisfying about keeping a master list of 24 possibilities, putting checks or Xs by each one as I drilled down to find potential problems with each.

(Man, I'm weird.)

I actually got very far — a full grid — down one path, and I thought it could be fine. But after letting it breathe, I took another look and felt like it just wasn't NYT-worthy — too many ugly bits, and not enough colorful fill.

It took some convincing to really try the layout that you see in the finished puzzle, because I was sure that isolating the first and last Js in the NW / SE corners would be the way to go. (Shows what I know!) With this final layout, I happened to get lucky by figuring out a good option rather quickly in the NE, filling acceptably around that J.

The SW … I constructed something I liked, but I did wonder if Will was going to like it as much. It contained HAPTIC, I FROZE, and AB TONER, all entries I dug. Will, though, wondered if any were common enough to be acceptable, and all three in that one region felt like too much. Even though I did a lot of HAPTICs in engineering and my dad has a (dusty) AB TONER and I love I FROZE as a stage fright line, I could see where he was coming from.

Redoing that little corner was rough. I churned out four options, each with some trade-offs, before Jon had the clever idea of paring the grid back even further than I had considered. I wasn't a fan of AS A SET — seemed like a partial to me — but I agreed that it was better than using something like OENONE, the woman Paris left for Helen.