OVER THE MOON

Olivia Mitra Framke, of Jersey City, N.J., is an academic adviser at the New School's College of Performing Arts in Manhattan. She started solving crosswords during college — but not at college. Her dad would hoard New York Times Magazines, and the two of them would solve together when she returned home.

This is Olivia's ninth crossword for The Times, and her fourth Sunday.

Last summer I emailed a constructor friend of mine to share the news of my 3rd NYT Sunday puzzle acceptance. I said to her in the email, "I'm over the moon!!!! ...maybe there's a theme there? Synonyms for OVER THE MOON, sitting atop names of moons?? I'll have to investigate!"

...and here we are! Incredible.

This puzzle was a lot of work. I started with a long list of moons and a long list of phrases containing synonyms for OVER THE MOON. My original design used OVER THE MOON as an in-grid revealer, and I tried very hard to have the moons go in order (from top to bottom in order of the planets). I also wanted to use the more well-known moons as much as possible, and I knew that it was really important for the moons to be the exact same length as the synonym in each phase. Taking all this into consideration, it was quite tricky to figure out how to make it all work. Once I decided to give up on keeping the moons in order, and I realized that I could take the revealer out and use it as the title, things started to come together.

Now, the fill. Stacking theme answers is always rough for a constructor because of the constraints around the stacks. So while I did my best with this one, I know the fill is messy (I've mentored a handful of new constructors in the past year, and there are so many things in this grid that I would call my mentees out on!). But overall I hope you were able to look past the cringe moments and enjoy the puzzle.

I finished this one and stared, baffled at the theme. Moons in the puzzle, clued by the planets they orbited ... okay, what else was there? Perhaps the moons were in some sort of order? And what did the long entries have to do with anything?

I tend to gloss over puzzle titles, so I had forgotten that OVER THE MOON was something. Ah! There's something over those moons! The long entries? Yes, long entries are over the moons ... so what?

Perhaps those themers have something to do with the moons they're over? I spent a lot of time researching the name GANYMEDE, figuring that it had to mean BLISSFUL IGNORANCE.

If only that's what "Jeff" meant.

An hour later, it finally dawned on me that OVER THE MOON wasn't just a literal interpretation, but it also hinted at the actual meaning of the phrase — a word meaning "over the moon" is directly atop a moon.

D'oh!

I appreciated that each of the synonyms matched the length of the moon's name. Nice bit of elegance. It's tough to stack pairs of themers, too. It's difficult to avoid artifacts like MNO when you do it, but given the extremely tough constraints, Olivia exceeded expectations.

What I liked best was the mini-themes she threw in. She's a gamer, so it was fun to get ZELDA, YOSHI, MAGE, ROLE PLAY, even ERAGON. Great job with the clue for ERAGON, too — relating it to "dragon" helps solvers unfamiliar with that series.

Another mini-theme, too — TONI Morrison, Zora NEALE Hurston, EBONY clued to Denzel, Halle, and Jamie. I read a lot of Morrison and Hurston back in college (25+ years ago now, yikes), so that brought back great memories.

The high point of the puzzle was the use of the title "Vaselina" in Mexico. Baffling until I finally pieced together the word GREASE. That is such a slick (sorry) piece of trivia!

Not the a-ha moment I hope for in Sunday puzzles, but it's a creative idea. It might have hit me more strongly if the long themers had been synonyms for OVER THE MOON, like PLEASED AS PUNCH, ON CLOUD NINE, IN HOG HEAVEN.