New York Times, Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Looking at the finished version of this puzzle, I think what I'm most impressed by is the mix of difficult (actually, evil) clues with easy clues. Maybe just as a Wednesday should be: a blend of tough and tender. Thanks Will (and Sam and Joel) for this.

I loved making this puzzle, taking familiar "____ in the ____" phrases and looking for synonyms or descriptors that enclosed a synonym for the first word in some way. It's one of my favorites — appropriate as my 25th for the NYT. Hope you enjoy(ed) it.

You may have read I'm principally a writer of novels and scripts, with crosswords as a second line of defense. I'm pleased to announce the recent publication of my sixth novel, BILLY BUCK, available on Amazon.com and my website, nedwhitebooks.com, print or ebook. It's a story of a nearly broken man driving his teenage kids cross-country and their strange encounters along the way. Here's the blurb:

Maybe it started with his trip to Devils Tower ten years earlier, or maybe it was connected to his life-threatening surgery a few years later. But for Billy Buck, something is seriously askew, seeming to distort the very fabric of reality around him.

Now he's on a cross-country road trip with his two teenage kids to deliver them to their mother in Southern California as part of their custody agreement. In a decrepit old van, one can expect misadventures over three thousand miles. But what happens en route lurches sharply off the highway into the realm of the nearly impossible, challenging their view of themselves and the world they inhabit.

Something out there - powerful and invasive - has its sights trained on them.

There's a great seed of an idea in here. Take "X in Y" phrases, and find theme entries that mean Y, such that you can spread out the letters of X within? As much as I dislike the scattered appearance of random circles strewn through a grid, that would make up for it, in spades.

However, the theme entries ought to be solid in their own right, not made up. There are so many "X in Y" phrases out there, and so many solid themers meaning Y, that making up whatever you want is the easy way out. As a solver, it's not enjoyable to work so hard, just to uncover something as contrived as MARS FOR INSTANCE.

Let's take a look at the first theme clue, [Bird in the hand?]. There are dozens of birds that could have been used, a lot of them short, with friendly letters: OWL, DODO, DOVE, JAY, EMU, HEN, etc. There are also many meanings of "hand" that lend themselves to snazzy, or at least non-made-up-sounding phrases. APPRENTICE, ROUND OF APPLAUSE, UNIT OF MEASUREMENT, FULL HOUSE, etc.

It's possible that no combination of bird + snazzy phrase would work. If that's the case, you move onto the next "X in Y" phrase and start over.

Gridwise, I stopped my tally of gluey bits after ANAT STET SDS AMI SNERD, and it kept on going. Far from a polished product.

With several more rounds of rework, improvement, and finessing, this could have been a solid offering.