New York Times, Thursday, August 22, 2013

I sent Will my first version of this crossword more than two years ago. It was the thirteenth puzzle I constructed. Before August 2011, I'd received nothing but rejections from the NY Times so "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You" just popped into my head.

I was trying to figure out how to use it as a theme when I found Ms. Kelly's June 22, 2006, Point of no return rebus. Thanks to Ms. Kelly, problem solved. The original grid, with eight unsymmetrical call boxes, wasn't exciting enough, but Will did like 38A. That was all the inspiration I needed to construct an entirely new version. I decided, in this case, that less was more, so I went with a call box in each corner along with the two in 38A. The only other answers in both versions are BACALL and CALLAS.

Sadly, this version was rejected, too, which surprised me because my mentor, Adam Perl, had a slightly different take: "I thought this puzzle was fantastic - challenging without being frustrating. The theme is excellent and very well carried through the puzzle. 'Don't call us...' was brilliant. The two sets of three eleven letter words were very good. I didn't find anything too crosswordy in it." Based on Adam's encouraging words, I decided to give it one more shot and added CALL BOX to the grid. Will wrote back, "Your CALL rebus 15x is looking pretty good…"

Hope you enjoyed it as much as Adam.

E-mail from Rachel Colangelo, organizer of the Pittsburgh Crossword Tournament: "We had another successful event and 64 participants helped to raise over $2,200 in support of the mission of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. In the finals (today's puzzle), the three solvers were stumped for some time, but once they caught on to the rebus trick they flew through the solution. Mike Wilhelm, our winner, was a very impressive solver — he finished the Monday puzzle in 3.5 minutes."

I really like when rebus puzzle have a good reason for multiple letters to be shoved into one square. This puzzle is an example of that, since it has literal CALL boxes along with CALL BOX at 14D. Clever! 1A/38A/67A are fantastic entries; not to mention, who doesn't like a ST PAULI GIRL and a RAPSCALLION in their puzzle? =]

I winced a bit at MONGST and AMARO, both of which I needed every cross to get. SPATLESE is fine in retrospect (and is something I'm happy to learn about), but it also took me every cross. Out of curiosity, I tried to see if there was a quick fix to get rid of the first two answers, but I didn't find any easy way of working around them. Perhaps Stu will start a campaign to get a thoroughfare in Philly (his hometown) renamed to MONG ST.? =]

So I wondered how difficult would it really be to get rid of MONGST and AMARO and decided to roll up my sleeves to dig in. I tried changing ROLL CALL to COLD CALL, but that didn't help much by itself. After another hour of trial and error, I realized that shifting the location of one set of black squares really helps. Those giant open spaces in the NW and SE are so tough to fill that shrinking them ever so slightly really helped.

This is the grid I finally worked out (empty regions should be easy to cleanly fill) after several hours. It has the benefit of two fewer 3-letter words, which is nice, but it does contain the clunkers ROLEO, EENS, and FER (amongst others) so it's not clear that it's a "better" grid. Perhaps I could improve it with a few more hours work, but I don't know. It's a testament to the difficulty of Stu's task!