New York Times, Saturday, August 16, 2014

Looking back at this puzzle, which I constructed about a year and a half ago, I can't help but feel somewhat underwhelmed. It's a fine enough puzzle, I suppose, but I don't think my voice really comes through on this one. Will said when he accepted this puzzle that there's "lots of fresh vocabulary" in it, and I guess that's true, but I'm sure solvers of my self-published freestyle puzzles will agree that the long answers here are comparatively lacking in spice and edginess (or perhaps they'll be pleased that they don't have to rely on things they learned reading Penthouse Letters to solve the puzzle, I dunno).

So there's that. Plus, BEER BELLY feels kind of trite to me or like I'm trying too hard to be edgy yet safe, and these days I would work harder to remove a boring entry like INDISPOSE from a stack. However, I do like GYPSY JAZZ for its unusual letter pattern, DEBUSSY because his sublime piano music is a paragon of the form, and STAR WIPE because it belongs to my favourite class of crossword entry: those that refer to things which are reasonably familiar even though their names are not (though they can be inferred with the right clue).

As for the clues, while I was pleased to see that most of my tricky ones survived the editing process (such as 30D and 18A), a lot of neat trivia that reflects my interests was cut. This is, of course, understandable, as the puzzle should be balanced and fair for all solvers, so I'll defer to Will's judgment there. Plus, my clues tend to run long, sometimes for the sake of cramming some neat fact in there but mostly just for comic relief, so cuts had to be made. I did appreciate Will leaving in my shout-out to my home province Saskatchewan at 29D (as far as I know, I'm the only NYT constructor from any of the three prairie provinces), though, and I'd like to take credit for the vaguely Peter Gordonesque gross-out clue at 19A but I can't.

Since I don't have much else to say about this puzzle, I might as well hijack this constructor's notes blurb to do a little shameless self-promotion, although perhaps doing it after callously cutting down my own unremarkable work isn't the best tactical play. At any rate, I'll be putting on a crossword solving tournament called The Indie 500 along with (and trying desperately to not be completely eclipsed by) indie crossword luminaries Andy Kravis, Erik Agard, Evan Birnholz, and Neville Fogarty. It will take place in DC in May of 2015. The puzzles will be...different than what you find in the NYT. And there will be pie.

Anyway, despite my misgivings and reservations about today's offering, I do hope that it could provide at least a modicum of amusement to your weekend. It doesn't really matter how I feel about it, as long as a few more people smile a little more today because of it.

Beautiful work from one of the up-and-coming young male indie constructors. Peter does something unusual today, merging triple-stacks together in the NW and SE corners. That's not often done, because it's hard to work those big L-shaped corners while keeping fill both lively and snazzy. It's tough enough to make three entries work well together in a triple-stack, and much, much more difficult to make six entries mesh.

The NW especially shows gold-medal execution. Not only does Peter have a fantastic triple-stack in GYPSY JAZZ (Django is one of my favorite musicians; awesome to see him get his due) / NOT YOU TOO / AHA MOMENT, but he crosses those with YO HEAVE HO. And single-word entries can often feel neutral or fall flat, but PTARMIGAN has that coolly bizarre PT- start, and SYMMETRY is so crosswordy. Nary a glue entry, too.

The young male indie movement isn't for everyone, of course. This is only the second time I've heard of DID I STUTTER (the first time was when another young male constructor showed me a grid for review). I'm sure certain solvers will love this entry, but it didn't do anything for me — the dangers of featuring a "hip" phrase which won't near-universally resonate. It's hard to predict if certain "fresh" phrases will have staying power or they'll fall by the wayside and quickly feel passe.

Ingenious layout, leading to a huge number of quality entries with very few minuses. Extremely hard to execute these big L corners, and Peter did a bang-up job today.