New York Times, Monday, September 15, 2014

I wrote this JELLY puzzle a while back... can't take a peek at it or I'll have to recuse myself from our yearly tournament that Andrew Laurence has organized to raise money for SMA.

All I remember is that I thought JELLY was an exceedingly fun word to say. I was thinking about words that followed. There aren't many (BEAN, ROLL, BELLY) but they are all fun and energetic, and that's what my goal is for all my puzzles! I can't say the word JELLY without smiling (and then wondering if I have something between my teeth!).

It's cool to be asked what I was thinking (in a nice way...not in the "What were you THINKING??!!!?" way...)

By the way, this month's Alaska Airlines magazine, Horizons, is featuring a lengthy article about a few of us West Coast constructors. Check it out below. Nancy Shack was nice enough to format it in a readable form.

Andrea's original manuscript had her own name, ANDREA, at 13A. While I don't mind inside jokes in constructors' puzzles, they shouldn't detract from the fill — which, unfortunately, is what happened here. The corner also came with E LEE, RLS and ERLE. The revised corner is much cleaner.

As is the case with many of Andrea's puzzles, this one is pangrammatic. I don't give a hoot about pangrams, which I don't think most solvers notice. At the same time, I don't mind them, as long as the fill doesn't suffer. The rare letters J, Q, X and Z can spice things up. In this puzzle all four of the rarest letters have been squeezed into the upper-right and lower-left corners, with the only real casualty being the unappealing ISE at 62A. Otherwise, nice. So this pangram's fine.

BTW, Andrea visited me a couple of months ago, and we saw Ian Hunter (formerly of Mott the Hoople, one of my favorite old bands) at a local music festival. I'm sure she and I were the only people among the thousands at the outdoor concert trying to make a crossword theme together!

A nice "words that can follow X" type theme. Will doesn't really take them anymore, as they've become overdone, so you need to have something extra special to make one of these work. I was surprised to read Acme's comment about only a few words that can follow JELLY, but indeed, what else is there? A quick search through our Finder page as well as onelook.com turned up only JELLY DOUGHNUT as something I'd like to eat. Er, see.

Big fan of Acme's utilization of short fill today. There isn't a lot of long fill (only two eight-letter words), but when you choose carefully slot by slot, you can work in things like JOHN DOE, TUVALU, SAVE AS, even the decidedly non-dreck DRECK. Sometimes constructors get accused of "hitting a button" to fill a crossword, but it'd be difficult to make that case here.

I quite liked the choice of themers, although I tried to enter ROLL THE DICE. Rolling a single die seems so forlorn. And after looking back at it, I wondered if JELLY BEAN and JELLY BELLY were a bit too close. But given that the latter is also slang for a pot belly, I think it's perfectly fine.

I would have liked a few more long non-theme fill entries, another pair of 8's or 9's or 10's. With less than five themers, there's almost always a way to work in at least two pairs of long fill. Often, you can get three or even four pairs if you're careful. One way to do that is to start with a 78-word grid like today's and test out taking away a pair of black squares. For instance, take away the black square to the right of OENO. Makes things harder to fill, no doubt, but it also opens up room for another juicy piece of fill.

Of course, doing that would most likely make JAZZ difficult to use, and I do love that NE corner. JAZZ is my one of favorite genres of music, and its 75% Scrabbly letters makes it 75% better. Best of all, there's nary a glue bit up there. It's interesting to experience different people's perspectives — I'm more on the side of not caring about pangrams, and to me, even one little bit like ISE isn't worth a Q. But heck, that quartet of QUAY/QUIT/TAX/ALEX is awfully nice, so I can understand how some solvers would highly approve.