New York Times, Friday, June 26, 2015

It's been on my bucket list to construct a crossword for the New York Times for a few years. In fact, in 2013, I made it a New Year's resolution to figure out how to submit a grid and possibly get one accepted... only then my MIT Mystery Hunt team won the event in January of 2013, which gave us the dubious prize of spending our 2013 writing the 2014 Hunt. And bonus for me, I got to be the director of the whole thing, which meant no time for trying to construct one measly crossword when I had so many other puzzle writing responsibilities on my plate that year [my favorite being the one where I dressed up like a bee to perform a bunch of songs bee-capella]. But in a weird way, I did achieve my New Year's resolution that year via my hunt teammate, Kevin Der, who convinced Will to let him use the New York Times puzzle to hide a Mystery Hunt answer. [Incidentally, crossword origami really should be more of a thing than it is.]

Once we had finished with the 2014 Mystery Hunt, I slept for about a month and then decided it was time to get back to that dream of constructing a puzzle for the Times myself, and I went about asking Kevin for advice, which was invaluable. Around this same time, the crossword blogosphere seemed to blow up around the topic of female constructors... particularly female themeless constructors.

So, obviously, I decided that my only option was to tackle a themeless. And if I could give it a bit of a feminist flavor, all the better. And thus my first seed entry, MANSPLAIN, was dropped into an empty grid at 1-across.

The other seed entry that I was deadset on including was SORRY I'M NOT SORRY, inspired by my friend Laura. This phrase called to me only after I had made the stack in the upper left, and the combination of that one 15 letter entry and the MANSPLAIN/I'M AT A LOSS/LUSITANIA stack more or less led me to the grid shape, with two other 15s spanning the grid. NASAL CONSONANTS aren't super flashy and IS IT GOING TO RAIN? isn't going to knock anyone's socks off, but I quite liked that HAVE IT ALL, with its female empowerment overtones, was able to slide next to CONSONANTS.

And SALT SPRAY, HIT A NERVE, and ONE PLAYER made up a pretty nice triple stack in the bottom right, buoyed by SWEET PEA. (Incidentally, have you ever tried to use SALT SPRAY? I have, and it just turned my hair into a sticky mess, with very little in the way of waves. The bottle lied.) TAKE A LOOK (at my first NYT crossword!) and PUP TENT closed out the long entries I liked — plus the bonus of the U BOAT clue sitting atop the LUSITANIA clue. I normally don't like cross-referenced clues, but when the clues are adjacent, I don't mind.

A few bits of crosswordese snuck their way in: DANAE, STERE, ODESA, BINET, OYER... ugh. I took German in high school, so ALTE and EIN don't bother me nearly as much as they might bother some people. I'm pleased to see that Will left the two references to my home state in the clues, (Minneapolis to Duluth and Senator Franken), but was sorry to see "They're high in Manhattan" for RENTS go. Will actually kept the majority of my clues — including the one where I snuck my first name into the puzzle, but his trivia for RARE and "Space race?" for EWOKS were definite improvements.

In general, I don't love the center of this grid and don't love the aforementioned crosswordese, but for the rest of my life, I will get to say that I debuted MANSPLAIN in the New York Times crossword, and that is a pretty awesome claim to fame.

For those keeping tabs on the "women writing themelesses" phenomenon, I wrote this one with a hybrid approach of by hand and onelook and grep. I could have used some more mature software, but that just seemed too easy.

Also, 31-across was a complete freak accident and I have no idea how that happened. But that one's for you, Dad. Happy belated Father's Day!

Debut! Enjoyable puzzle featuring three strong grid-spanners. I've never used SORRY IM NOT SORRY — or actually heard it used — but that means little, as I'm comically unhip. It Bings well, anyway. (Wait — Bing isn't what the cool kids use these days? But they pay you to use the service ...)

Puzzles featuring three or more grid-spanners usually don't contain many other long answers, so I appreciated seeing a whole bunch more; ten more answers of 8+ letters. Thirteen total long slots is a good starting point, and you'd hope to convert at least ten of them into colorful answers.

So how does Erin do? HAVE IT ALL is simple yet zippy, same with IM AT A LOSS and SALT SPRAY. LUSITANIA and STIPENDS don't do much for me, but I'm sure there will be WWI historians who disagree. Erin adds in a few mid-length goodies in PUP TENT and BB GUNS … and the awesome PROTEAN, a word I'm hoping to use more often. What a struggle to suss it out, and what a neat a-ha moment when I realized the word referred to Proteus, the shape-shifter of Greek myth.

Overall, I'd say the puzzle has about 12 assets. Pretty good. And just a few liabilities, the short kind of NNE, EIN, ALERS stuff; pretty overlookable, and an impressive performance from a debut constructor.

I would have liked a little more puzzle flow, as my solve chunked down into three separate sections: the left, the middle, and the right. Makes it easier to construct, but proteanizing a few black squares would have helped make the puzzle feel more cohesive.

(Proteus is turning over in his grave.)

These days, the competition for themeless slots is incredibly high — much higher than for any other type of puzzle — so it's all that more impressive that Erin broke in the hard way. Looking forward to more from her.