MORES

Julian Kwan, of Dumont, N.J., is a software test engineer for a telecommunications company. He started solving crosswords in college (University of Pennsylvania, class of 1997). Several years ago, after noticing that all the Times puzzles had bylines, "I figured, why couldn't one of them be me, right?"

This is Julian's fourth published crossword, but his first for The Times.

I'm thrilled and honored to be making my NYT debut! I had been solving on and off since the mid-1990s but really picked it up over the past few years once I started solving on my phone. I've been constructing puzzles over roughly the same time period. I'd like to thank my mentor Mark McClain, who I found on the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory group on Facebook. He's always been eager to share his thoughts on my work and ideas. Without a doubt, he made this particular puzzle better by pointing out obscure words and areas overloaded with proper names. Oftentimes, it takes a fresh set of impartial eyes to notice these things. I'd also like to thank my wife Amy, who assured me that REIKI is, in fact, a thing, thereby saving me from having to refill that section.

The idea for this puzzle came to me when I remembered that Canadians supposedly like to say "eh" after everything. A small investment in a rhyming dictionary yielded me several word pairs like FILL / FILET, PARK / PARQUET, etc. I specifically stuck to words where the accent is on the "eh" syllable at the end. I originally had all my the themers clued as "what the person is really trying to say." For example, TRAILER PARQUET was "That's some fancy flooring for an RV, isn't it?" UNSOLICITED BIDET was "That weird bathroom fixture was pretty unexpected, wasn't it?" I guess the editing team thought better of that idea.

This is my first 21x puzzle. I must say, making this grid and filling it was not easy! Not for me anyway. It only took me 7 weeks, hehe. I'm pretty sure I gave up in frustration many times along the way, only to resume reluctantly a few days later. I ended up writing a computer program to help me sort through the hundreds of layout possibilities and identify the handful that had the most flexibility. That was exhausting. But I'm sure glad I powered through.

Many thanks to the editing team for their improvements to the clues and for pointing me in the right direction through all of my other rejections.

The title, MORES, doesn't make sense if you're a boor who's always pronounced the word with one syllable. Can't imagine who'd be so uncultured as to do something like that, just because the word looks like it should rhyme with "smores." Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go buy marshmallows and graham crackers.

Some fun spelling changes, PARK to PARQUET and CASH to CACHE much more interesting than the straightforward addition of ET, like BUFF to BUFFET and BID to BIDET. Sound addition puzzles are so common that a feature like kooky spelling changes is so welcome.

There's something so amusing about an UNSOLICITED BIDET showing up at one's door. I'm curious what Mark Rober would have that package spray ...

I did wonder about the DEAL to DELAY sound change. Pronunciation differs across the country, so perhaps DELAY is more "deel-ay" to others. It sure jarred my ear, though.

Debuting with a Sunday is so difficult, and Julian's gridwork is amazing. Not a dab of short crossword glue anywhere, hardly an entry even the pickiest of editors could flag. It's not rocket science, but it is a matter of testing and iteration, which is incredibly time-consuming if done properly. It's clear that Julian put in the work to polish, polish, polish; changing patterns, adding cheater squares (like the black square at the end of MUST) when necessary, to achieve maximum smoothness.

Sunday puzzles are so big that it's so important to inject humor, liveliness, spiciness into the clues throughout the grid. It only takes half a dozen or so, but Sunday puzzles often fall down in this regard. Julian did not. I ticked off six amazing clues as I went:

1. SCOT playing off of "first person"
2. REF clued with a funny heckle
3. ALLEY OOP as a literal "pass up"
4. AFT riffing on "Back in the USSR"
5. ONES testing your keyboard knowledge of where the exclamation point lies
6. APPLES not related to Bob Hope, but to the hopes you have when you bob for APPLES!

Top-notch execution, so impressive on a Sunday debut.