New York Times, Saturday, July 8, 2017

This puzzle has a long story behind it! I was inspired to do a quad stack of 9's after solving this gem from Byron Walden and Brad Wilber in 2013. After tearing my hair out trying to get the lower left to work, I discovered that Byron and Brad made constructing such a themeless look much easier than it actually is: Every stack I was finding had either too many subpar short entries, too few interesting 9-letter entries, or both!

I soon realized that having four top-notch 9-letter entries plus no junk in the surrounding fill was going to be too hard given how unoptimized my word list was at the time, so I decided to shoot for 3/4 top-notch 9-letter entries plus smooth crossers. The magical seed entry turned out to be WINE PRESS, which I picked because a) I think it's a fun entry and b) lots of 4-letter entries end in R, E, and S. If memory serves, this puzzle sat in my "Works in Progress" folder for a long time after I filled the lower left, because I was literally getting nowhere with the upper right.

Fast forward to January 2015. After playing around with the grid for the gazillionth time, I finally found a match for the lower left! I was stoked and quickly sent the puzzle off to Will ... but my hopes were dashed by the rejection email that came a few months later. Will liked the grid and most of the fill but objected to HOTBOXING, a stoner term that roughly translates to "smoking weed in an enclosed space, such as a car."

I saw that getting rid of HOTBOXING would mean completely reworking the upper-right corner, so this puzzle sat around for another year until a random Friday night in college when everyone in my dorm was partying. A bunch of guys were playing beer darts a few doors down, and I remember thinking, "Now there's a killer entry for that upper right!" (You can see why I don't get invited to many parties.) So I threw down BEER DARTS and set to work on the upper right. A few minutes later, the guys down the hall came in, and they were totally pumped that I'd stuck beer darts into a crossword puzzle for The New York Times!

So by the time I was done with the puzzle, I ended up with both an acceptable revision and some serious dorm cred. I hope you enjoy!

Beautiful work; best 4x10 stacks I've seen in a while. Those upper-right and lower-left corners are so tough to fill with both snazz and smoothness that few constructors even try (I still haven't worked up the nerve).

To get PROCTORED / RAP BATTLE / ORIENTEER / BEER DARTS (don't know what this is, but it sounds awesome/dangerous) with just a CBER (and that's in use, so I hear) — and with HEAD STAND running through it all! Fantastic. Now, PROCTORED and ORIENTEER don't seem as pleasing to me as RAP BATTLE and BEER DARTS, but for one-word entries, they do nice jobs. Having done a little ORIENTEERing racing, it was fun for me to see.

Opposite corner had similar results, with CRAFT SHOW and WINE PRESS standing out. REMOULADE was almost as interesting to me, as I've taken a recent turn toward cooking. Not sure I'd ever make a REMOULADE, but what a fun word to say. Speaking of fun to say, TURPITUDE!

I would have liked every one of those eight long answers to be as awesome as RAP BATTLE, but for this type of extremely tough layout, these results are about as good as I've seen.

Interesting that I was less impressed by the easier to fill areas — I did pause for a moment at A AND E (never written out like this in real life), OMARR (outdated), TRE, LEM. And that's with David already having placed a black square between NEMEA and TRE, making for an easier time filling that corner.

I usually prize grid flow, having multiple ways in and out of each corner, but I'm curious if moving a black square up to the G of GENOA would have helped smooth out the bottom right. Grid would still have had plenty of flow, and I bet David could have worked in entries as strong as HOVERBOARD without quite as much crossword glue.

Overall though, an entertaining product that this constructor greatly admired.