New York Times, Monday, February 13, 2017

BRENT: In the ten years I've been submitting to the NYT, the rejections always included constructive criticism. Comments like "the theme isn't robust enough" gave way to "we accepted a very similar puzzle weeks ago!" I felt like Thomas Edison experimenting with the light bulb. Acceptance did arrive in 2014, but this puzzle is seeing the light of day only now.

Let me back up a bit. In a used bookstore in 2006, I discovered Crossworld, Marc Romano's book about the Stamford puzzle tournament. It hooked me, as I'd been a word nerd my whole life—a linguistics major, archivist, paleographer, Spanish instructor, and memory coach. In 2006, I was living in Boston. The tourney was coming up, and I began counting the days. There, I made friends with stellar constructors and wound up giving Brendan Emmett Quigley a ride back to Beantown. His energy was infectious.

My initial efforts were pretty cringeworthy, but essential. I enjoyed some early successes, with my first puzzle appearing in 2008 in the New York Sun and in 2011 in a Penguin Anthology of literary-themed crosswords. Huge shoutouts to Peter Gordon and Ben Tausig, respectively, for their support.

The NYT remained the Holy Grail. I submitted solo and with Michael Blake, whom I'd met through Monday NYT puzzle queen Andrea Carla Michaels. We submitted this puzzle in February 2014 and got the "crossword — yes!" email from Will in April.

As I was solving an NYT puzzle in August by David Steinberg and Bernice Gordon, the answers looked eerily familiar. It was the same theme as ours! We wrote to Will, who apologized for the duplication and promised to run ours in a couple of years "so it fades from solvers' memories." He is a man of his word, and here we are today.

MICHAEL: We can hardly begrudge that Will accepted the Bernice/David collaboration with a similar theme and ran it immediately, as that carried a delightful new cruciverbal record: the biggest age difference between co-constructors. We're happy that our puzzle, accepted slightly earlier, still got published 3 years later.

Debut! Brent and Michael bring us a vowel progression theme with the HxLL pattern. I love the term HULLABALLOO, an all-too-familiar description of a house with a 6-mo. old and a toddler who can now reach just about anything.

I've heard some folks say they're dead tired of vowel progressions, and I do think they are going by the wayside. But that's just the natural course of any standard theme type. Constructors have to figure out ways of doing an overdone theme type better, more elegantly, a little differently for it to stand out. A shame that this one is so similar to the one Brent and Michael pointed out.

ACME told me that vowel progressions are like poetry — I liked that sentiment. The sound of HALL to HELLO to HILL to HOLLY to HULLA ... some might holla that it's hella pretty.

(Don't worry, the poetry police just revoked my license.)

Five super-long themers are no easy feat. The overlap between HALL OF FAME and HELLO HOW ARE YOU causes all sorts of problems, for example. Check out where GOT TO sits — there are so many down answers that need to run through that section, and that causes strain. Inelegant to get OF ART at the very top, and that NIMES / AMATO crossing is a killer. Toss in REMOW, and that's butting up against my threshold for crossword glue for an entire puzzle.

Considering HELLO HOW ARE YOU is just so-so in my eyes, I'd rather have seen something shorter, like HELLO THERE! matched with HOLLY BOUGH or the like.

Nice bonuses in ALL FEMALE and RULE OF LAW; hard to accomplish within such a theme-dense puzzle. A few years ago, I spent some time in the Gambia with an NGO, and I came back with all sorts of ideas how to help. One of my former econ profs suggested that what he'd do would be to find ways of strengthening RULE OF LAW, for, without it, any other effort will be close to meaningless. Fingers crossed for a smooth transition of power in the Gambia.