New York Times, Monday, November 9, 2020

I wrote the first draft of this puzzle while eating lunch with my mom by the water in San Francisco. While explaining how one might come up with a crossword theme, I rattled off these theme answers by means of example — I was redesigning the appearance of 59A on our website at work that day — and was delighted to realize that the answer lengths were symmetrical. Given her incredible support for my puzzle-making — and how tasty the sandwiches were — I'd like to give my mom an advisory credit. Thanks, mom!

In my day job, I build digital news products for the Bay Area public media organization KQED. Looking back at this puzzle a year later, it makes me smile to notice how apt the clues and answers for 48A, 49A, 51A, 59A, and 39D are given my line of work.

Some of my other favorite answers: I'm delighted to have written some queer representation into 10D. And where I grew up, we called a 37A a roly-poly.

I wrote my first crossword for my wedding in 2018. This is the second crossword I constructed and my first NYTimes acceptance. I submitted it a year and a week ago today.

Playing "Name That Theme" is a great way for experienced solvers to have fun with a Monday. Uncover the first theme answer, PALLBEARER, and see that ENTOMB is atop it. Huh. Is it National Graveyard Day already?

Ignore your ridiculous brain, then jump to the next long slot: ___ GRANT? Even if you don't know ENOL — and why would you? — once you guess PELL GRANT, you're off to the races. It's so satisfying to fill in PILL POLL PULL, bam bam bam, feeling smug as a PILLBUG in a rug.

I did feel HAPLESS, though, trying to complete the theme phrases. POLL … I cycled through POLLSTERS and POLL WORKER (stuffing the last ballot box with ER) before pulling the plug on my smugness.

Hey, PULL THE PLUG! I'd heard of PULL QUOTES before, but it took a while to place exactly what that was (a descriptive term for a giant block of text inside an article that immediately pulls your eye.) Solid entry, but not as smugness-inducing as PULL THE PLUG.

I'm usually against injecting long bonuses into a puzzle because they 1) tend to distract from theme, and 2) cause filling problems. The first issue isn't a problem today since "vowel movements" make it easy to pick out the themers. COCKAPOO doesn't muddy the waters as much as it usually would.

I would have pared back the gridwork audaciousness, though, since COCKAPOO forced ENOL, which was aptly clued using "unstable" — I can imagine ENOL destabilizing newer solvers' confidence.

It's a shame that a single entry can be so jarring, since the rest of the product was aces, with only minor KELPS (weird plural) and ATA, along with the easily accessible and interesting mid-lengthers: GOES APE, RAPPELS, SHOPPER, ST PAUL.

I was going to end with an analysis about consistency, why it's better to avoid having a single plural theme entry (PULL QUOTES), but I realized that 99% of people would say that level of critique is pure cockapoo.