New York Times, Thursday, August 28, 2014

This theme seemed fairly straightforward to me, and it gave me my chance at last to allude to Ward Cleaver, perhaps frustrating younger solvers who may have only a vague awareness of who he was and how he helped guide my generation.

I'm one of those 6% in Patrick Merrell's recent survey who does puzzles by hand, so I poked around and found a preexisting Times grid with the right letter count in theme answers going across, then flipped it 90 degrees, tweaked it a bit, and slapped DOWNWARDS in the center. Darn the luck, I couldn't make it work! So I split it into DOWN and WARD with a central block, and other words started to fill in very nicely.

At 27-Across, with N _ P_ _ W _ locked in from three theme answers, NEPHEWS is the only possible fill (according to databases), interestingly enough. I think it's a pretty cool word here, and I love Will's only slightly misdirective clue for it. I'm much less proud of 31-Across RECUE and the 52-Down partial E FOR, and will labor in the future to keep these wince-able words at bay. Patience!

This is my first themed puzzle for the Times, and I honestly believed it was Tuesday-ish, but no, Will figured it better for today, with the advantage that it was time for a Thursday puzzle without rebuses.

There's been some chatter about which puzzles are harder to make — themed or themeless — and I can say from experience that a publishable themed puzzle is much harder for me. But I hope to keep at it, with focus on early to mid-week theme ideas. Thanks, all.

Is BRA SALE (63A) a legitimate crossword entry? Is it a "thing"? I debated a long time about this, ultimately deciding it sneaked by. Sometimes a good clue can salvage a weak entry, and I thought this one made the answer work.

This one's bound to be divisive, some people loving these definitional puzzles, some people hating them. I appreciate Ned's extra layer here — DOWN WARDs oriented downward — a fun play on word WARD.

This type of definitional puzzle used to be prevalent, most often four definitions of a common word like BROWN. I personally enjoy them immensely when the grid entries read as in-the-language phrases, which adds such an elegance to the theme. For instance, PRISON WING is an entry I wouldn't hesitate to use in filling one of my own puzzles. It's hard to find enough in-the-language phrases that fit a theme like this!

The knock on these types of puzzles is that often the theme entries read as stilted, a dictionary definition. Entering ACTRESS SELA can be sort of like homework, a bit like summarizing an Wikipedia entry in an loosey-goosey way. The fact that it could be a number of things like AUTHOR WARD or CSI:NY STAR or TV STAR SELA makes it less elegant in my book.

I have a lot of admiration for constructors still working in graph paper (or Excel). On one hand it strikes me as Luddite behavior — if you use a computer, why not use software? — but how many constructors would have come up with BRA SALE if it hadn't already been in their word list? On the other hand, a software-assisted approach would have allowed evaluating many more grid patterns and black square positions, in order to eliminate the E FOR and RECUE kind of stuff Ned mentioned. Not a clear answer for me which is better; I appreciate the variety of approaches.