New York Times, Friday, January 3, 2020

This was my first serious attempt at a themeless puzzle, and wow, they are a different beast constructing-wise than themed puzzles. Like playing free jazz after military marches, or Calvinball after chess.

Initially, I built this puzzle around a bottom pair of TAINTED LOVE and CHAOTIC EVIL. The editing team replied, saying they liked the puzzle except for the entries I thought were the best! They said both seed entries weren't well known enough, which surprised me, but I was happy to instead include TAKE REVENGE and CROP CIRCLES (my original corny clue: "Signs of a cereal killer?") — apologies to my D&D comrades for not getting CHAOTICEVIL into the Times.

Word notes from XWord Info:

1. TEA SET was first clued in the Times in 1946 as "Tea-things," which wouldn't fly today.
2. OPER was clued as "Music drama, in Berlin" prior to the Shortz era. Since 1994 it's been clued re: the telephone button.
3. COKE was not clued in reference to the soft-drink for decades — presumably because that's too near a drug reference? COKE was "Industrial fuel" or "Carboniferous by-product" until "Pepsi rival" in 1996.
4. IOR is easily my least favorite entry here (sorry!), but imagine if it were clued like it was in 1952: "Common suffix."

Thanks to my friend Saya for writing "Economic lose-lose" for STAGFLATION, and to XWord Info and Jeff Chen's Personal Wordlist for helping make this puzzle. Using Jeff's list has greatly improved my constructing!

Also, I think I'm the first to benefit from the new payment scale, in which a constructor receives the veteran's constructing rate on their third puzzle rather than their eleventh. This is my third puzzle, and I'm lucky enough to have it published right after the change. Thank you to everyone at the Times who made this possible, and to everyone in the crossword community who has been advocating for increased constructor pay.

Sometimes all it takes is a single entry or clue for a themeless to sing to you. For Jim Horne, it was a clue whose cleverness I missed the first time around. "One" is its final number? I had already filled in most of A CHORUS LINE, so I didn't stop to think about it. I'm so glad Jim pointed out what a great misdirect this is! If you didn't notice the quotation marks, the clue would feel deviously mathematical.

For me, it was STAGFLATION. The MBA in me gets tickled by econ terms, especially one so colorful. (It describes when economic growth is stagnant, but inflation is high — a double whammy.) You'd think that economists are boring, but I have a lot of econ friends who are hilarious.

"Hilarious" in quotes might be a better description.

I had two hesitations before giving this one the POW!:

1. IOR is a particularly gloopy gluey bit, less in the camp of "minor crossword blip" and more "three random letters stuck together." Inelegant to say the least; glad Will Treece recognized this.
2. The other was more subjective — STAGFLATION is a downer already, then you add in ANEMIAS, UNFRIEND, BRUTALITIES, and TAKE REVENGE? Make love, Will, not war!

However, I greatly enjoyed the novelty of the grid design, neither a standard "triple-stacks in each of the four corners" nor a "wide-open middle," but something neatly in between. The smart black square placement allowed for smooth solving flow, while also making it constructor-friendly to fill. I like the trade-offs.

I had been vacillating, POW! or scow, and the conversation Jim and I had pushed it over the edge. It's not easy to cater to a hugely varied solving population.