New York Times, Monday, November 7, 2022

This theme came to me on a hike in Bryce Canyon, Utah. It's not that there are a lot of bugs there, but on a long hike, my mind wanders and empties, which seems to create fertile ground for theme ideas. Once I started along the bug path, I was delighted to realize how many good expressions there were, ones that I had often used myself. Ants in my pants when I sit at a desk working on theme ideas too long, check. A bee in my bonnet when I am trying to find a grid that works, check. Butterflies in my stomach as I open an email from the NY Times Crossword editors to see if this might finally be an acceptance, check, check, check.

As a fairly new constructor when I made this puzzle, I thought that there were fixed tradeoffs in good fill — that once a grid and themes were in place, you could make a word or a section better, but another section would suffer. So I submitted the puzzle with quite a few problem areas, thinking it was the best it could be. Thanks to the many iterations with Wyna Liu, I was delighted to learn that this wasn't the case — a grid can almost always be improved!

Half a themer at the start, half at the end? The revealer in the middle instead of at the end? Such things FLY IN THE FACE of convention!

It bugs me that it took an hour to think that up.

Great theme set; three phrases in the form of (type of bug) IN MY (body part). Three elements create buzz:

• Consistency. Never using anything but IN MY in the middle lends elegance.
• Completeness. Like a complete set of rare stamps, a Pokemon deck missing not even the most legendary of cards, or a database containing 100% of puzzles, there's something so satisfying about completeness. Can you think of another bug phrase that might work? I couldn't (as if that wasn't clear enough from my terrible joke above).
• Perfect revealer. WHAT'S BUGGING YOU so aptly describes these three phrases, each one expressing existential angst.

The themers miraculously pair up for symmetry? Praise the great goddess Cruciverba! But as always, she demands a sacrifice. 11/13/15/13/11 is Sisyphus-level torture, constructors doomed to fill the grid nearly to the end, only to discover a fatal flaw that unravels all their work, letter by letter, until they're back at square one.

The middle three themers create a devious challenge. It's smart to space them out as Jill did, but starting a puzzle fill with BUTI, leading to ENTO and then IONO is not a great kickoff. The B??I pattern is Hadean.

It's a tough challenge for a veteran constructor, and I give Jill a lot of credit for managing to cross the finish line. I'd like to see what she could do with the PAR of PARADED blacked out, though — it would open up some great possibilities cascading into an easier-to-fill middle.