New York Times, Friday, December 2, 2016

This puzzle started with the double stack of HERE'S HOPING and PRIZE INSIDE. How I got a grid of this shape in the end I'm not sure. This was still in a period when I built puzzles without the aid of a program, so that may explain it. But now I've put down my spears and cave drawings and learned how to use (Cross)fire.

I think I'm happiest with the clues on this one for two reasons. First, I love the fun facts, particularly SPANDEX, ANT, and SIXTIES. Second, most of the across clues are my own. When I first started constructing, I was such a grid hound that I gave little time to the clues in an attempt to submit as many puzzles as quickly as possible. As a nascent constructor raised on a diet of crossword blogs, I picked up their entry-fetish, where their writing focuses only on the hottest words in the themeless grid while overlooking the creative pop of the clever clues, which could make blander entries like CEASE FIRES or CEL come alive. While a puzzle need its lifeblood of OSCAR NOD's and GAME FACE's, I discovered that my early philosophy was fairly myopic. I await the day when a themeless is filled with purposely banal entries, yet the clues are the prize, and by themselves make the puzzle sexy. Here's hoping.

Not many themelesses feature 11-letter entries because they tend to force 3-letter entries, and those bitty guys are hard to make interesting. So it was fun to get some entries that felt pretty fresh — they were either completely new to me, or I had only seen them once or twice in the past year. I do remember SATELLITE TV from just a few months ago, but EDITORS NOTE and especially PRIZE INSIDE did a good job anchoring their respective corners.

I really enjoyed the long entries in that upper right corner — GAME FACE / OSCAR NOD / TEA ROOM, crossed by SHE BEAR and ROMCOM = yes, please! There often is a price to pay with such goodness crammed together, but ASE and MCA ain't that bad. (ASE is iffy along with all the other chemistry suffixes like OSE, ISE, ENE, etc., and MCA is outdated.)

SPANDEX also shined, not just as a very good entry, but because of its neat clue — Andrew brings up a good point about how great clues tend to be undervalued among constructors not named Patrick Berry. What a great piece of trivia, that SPANDEX is an apt anagram of EXPANDS! Some marketing geniuses at work right there.

Curious 1-Across in LAVABO. For me, 1-Across (and 1-Down to a lesser extent) tends to set the tone for a puzzle. LAVABO is a perfectly fine word, but its Wikipedia article does use the word "ewer" to describe it in the first paragraph. Ewer is also a real word, but both of them give me a sense of "words I only know because of crosswords." I've learned to be okay with this concept, but I wonder if other solvers still find these types of words unappealing.

ORLE is another entry that gave me that sense discomfort. I don't mind a few minor SSE, ONT, ANON, STL, dabs of crossword glue, but as a whole there felt like there was quite a lot today.

But overall, still enough snappy entries like CEASE FIRES and even some good mid-length stuff in HELIOS (love me some Greek myths!), CHATTEL, HAS DIBS, SIXTIES to keep my interest.