New York Times, Tuesday, September 28, 2021

I am so excited to be making my crossword constructing debut! I have loved doing puzzles of various kinds for as long as I can remember, and I submitted my first crossword to the New York Times in 2016. It was rejected, and not long afterward I got pregnant with twins, so that derailed my crossword-constructing career for a while.

During the pandemic, I decided to take another crack at it. I got two great mentors, Caitlin Reid and Sid Sivakumar, through the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory on Facebook, and they have helped me immensely. The learning curve is big! I am an appellate public defender, so I write quite a bit, but it turns out that putting words together in an appellate brief and putting words together in a crossword are very different skills. I submitted several puzzles last year that were rejected, always with thoughtful feedback, before this one was accepted.

This puzzle started out without the visual aspect. I just had three 15-letter theme answers containing ACUTE, OBTUSE, and RIGHT, and then a 15-letter revealer: WHAT IS YOUR ANGLE. But after going through a couple of iterations of the puzzle in that form, I decided to try adding in the visual aspect to make it more interesting. That really limited the theme entries I could use — it turns out there are only a couple of common 15-letter phrases with RIGHT in the center. So, I would like to give a shout-out to Spike Lee for making this puzzle possible.

This numbers junkie always sits up straight when the crossword invokes mathiness. As soon as I uncovered BEING OBTUSE, I was hoping for KNEW ALL THE ANGLES as a revealer. I jumped down to the bottom set of circles and filled in ACUTE. A quick check at 44-Across showed that the A did indeed fit with AISLE.

So much for knowing all the angles.

It's neat that the word ANGLE shares its E with that of OBTUSE and ACUTE — I'd never noticed that before. It's a shame that the word RIGHT doesn't end with an E to make everything elegant and tidy, but the shared G does work.

I paused in the center, though, wondering why we were forming a plus sign with ANGLE and RIGHT. It's not as picture-perfect as the others, since there are not just one, but four right angles in that center cross.

Some excellent bonuses in the grid. LIFE GIVING is inspiring, SETS ABLAZE is good, THE LATEST is fun, and not only is W.E.B. DUBOIS an important figure in American history, his name makes for great crossword material, since the *BDU* string of letters goes from baffling to a neat a-ha.

Some prices to pay, due to having to build around the diagonal ANGLEs and all those long bonuses, though. It's not a surprise that LIX shows up around one of the ANGLEs, as does NTWT, URE, and LTRS. Too many dabs of crossword glue, but I appreciated that Meghan used her flexible corners to try to make up for it with extra color. JULEP, JAVA, UNIX, VIZ all add in the rare-letter flair, the JVXZ worked in smoothly.

Will Shortz doesn't often accept puzzles that repeat words in circled letters, because this makes it too easy for solvers to plunk in the same thing over and over. I like that the ANGLEs go in different directions — one backward, even — addressing that issue.

Some inelegances in execution, but I enjoyed picking up that neat coincidence about OBTUSE, ACUTE, and ANGLE all sharing the terminal E. Makes for a nice visual, more interesting in some ways than the last ANGLEs puzzle from a few years back.