A RARE FIND

Johan Vass is a restaurant worker in Stockholm, Sweden. Though he has never been to the United States, he has been solving American crosswords for many years. He says his personal best times for New York Times puzzles range from 3:21 on a Monday to 10:36 on a Sunday.

Somewhere along the way he started constructing crosswords in English — which is quite a challenge for someone coming from another language and culture. Johan says this one took him two months to make. I'm honestly in awe.

So happy to be making my New York Times debut! This has been a goal of mine for quite a few years now. I'm not exactly new to crossword-making though, far from it. I've just mostly been making them in a different language.

I was born in Stockholm, Sweden, almost exactly 30 years ago, and have probably been making crosswords for well over 20 of them. I don't even really remember at what exact age I first started, but I was very young. As a kid I used to make crosswords in my native Swedish for a solving audience consisting mostly of my parents, but at the age of 20 I started contributing regularly to a Swedish crossword magazine, which I continued to do for a few years.

Over time though, I started to grow a bit bored with Swedish puzzles and felt that I needed a new challenge, so around 9 years ago I decided to try and see if I could solve an American crossword. Turned out I couldn't. So I continued trying until I could, and ever since then I've been solving the NYT and other American puzzles daily. Coming from a constructor background, it was always a no-brainer for me that I wanted to learn to construct American crosswords as well.

We Swedes may be very heavily influenced by American culture, and are usually ranked as some of the best non-native English speakers in the world, but there are obviously still some culture/language barriers I have to deal with when it comes to American puzzles. But part of the fun in doing crosswords is getting to learn new things, and I'm probably learning just as much from making them as I am from solving them, and am really enjoying myself in the process.

I started making this particular puzzle back in September, submitted it in November, and it got accepted just over a month ago, in early March. It came about very spontaneously, inspired simply by hearing someone use the expression "like trying to find a needle in a haystack," immediate realizing its potential as a basis for a theme, and within seconds I started working on the puzzle, without even so much as an idea as to what to actually do with it beyond the central gimmick. I honestly didn't even have much hope that it would actually work, as it required stacking so many theme answers directly on top of each other, which is never an easy task. So I was really pleased that it actually did turn out to be doable, and that it eventually made it all the way to getting published in the New York Times.

I had another puzzle (a low-word count themeless) accepted at the same time as this one as well, so you can definitely expect to see more from me in the future.

I love the audacity, stacking a whole lot of HAY around a hidden NEEDLE. I've considered doing something similar with a DOGPILE, but any time you get more than three themers piled atop each other, you're begging for pain. To get six (!) HAYs with a NEEDLE in the middle — without that many fill compromises around them! — is amazing.

(If only there were a famous SHAYNE ...)

When I got to IT'S A LOST CAUSE, I thought it might refer to "losing one's marbles," and the grid looked vaguely like a pachinko machine. That could have been cool! Then, the black squares lent a Tetris-like appearance. I finally figured out the concept and mused that the HAYstack looked like a falling Jenga tower. The games we play!

Although it doesn't look like a traditional haystack, the literal stack of HAY is eye-popping.

IT'S A LOST CAUSE is such a punnily apt phrase for this concept. GRASPING / AT STRAWS is almost as good since HAY can be described as straw-like in appearance. This concept could have felt like a one-trick pony, but Johan did such a great job turning up punnily-related phrases.

Fantastic job with the cluing. I ticked off half a dozen skillful pieces of wordplay, so important to help in holding solvers' interest. [Subway fare] is outstanding, misdirecting innocently to tokens or money. That's Subway, the fast-food chain, and their FOOTLONG sandwiches.

I'm often not a fan of debut short fill, but there's something so kooky about MM HMM — can't decide if I love or hate it. I admire how it has no vowels, though, while OUI has no consonants. Excellent "clue echo."

Not everything worked perfectly, but I admired that a debut constructor shot for the stars. These kinds of brave ideas are what the NYT Sunday needs.