New York Times, Thursday, February 20, 2020

I had the idea for this revealer while driving home from work in November 2018. It's not the best place to get ideas as they can't be written down immediately, but thankfully I was able to hold on to this one. I built the puzzle on and off through November and December. Submitted in January 2019, accepted in May.

To make the puzzle, I created a word list that replaced all instances of "ATE" and "OO" with 8. I placed the revealer and H8RSGONNAH8 in the grid as if I were building a themeless and tried to build the puzzle from there. There was a bit of a challenge to evenly distribute eight 8's in the grid while ensuring the horizontal 8's were all replacing ATE and pronounced like 8 while ensuring the vertical eights were all replacing OO. Because I didn't have a set of theme answers in mind, the provided some freedom to try to make the fill as interesting and clean as possible.

Overall, I'm happy with the result. KEPI and OLEG aren't great entries, but they don't make me go YIPE either. This is my first Thursday puzzle in the Times and probably the tricksiest themed puzzle I've had published anywhere to date. I'm curious to read what everyone's thoughts are on it.

The English alphabet offers so many opportunities for playfulness. Assuming capitalization, there are some letters that look like others when upside-down, ones that have reflective symmetry (A, H, I, etc.), splitsies, even some that become others when one half is lopped off. The possibilities for wordplay are endless!

I've seen several crosswords involving a letter or number split into two parts, so I wasn't wowed right off the bat by today's 8 -> double O. In fact, I was annoyed at first when I did the usual rebus schtick, entering OO into each square. Come on, Joe, that's an infinity sign, not an 8!

Nice shift of thinking when I realized my mistake and changed them into 8s.

There are so many touches I appreciated:

• PIECES OF EIGHT makes for such an apt revealer.
• Eight instances of the number 8! That's perfect.
• Snazzy themer choices, with great ATE material like HATERS GONNA HATE ...
• ... as well as long OO phrases like SCHOOL DAZE, WHIRLPOOLS, and even GOOF UP. It's much easier to use shorties like MOON, SOOT, TOON, etc. Going the extra mile in the OO themers added a lot of color.
• The leap from EIGHT to ATE is a bit odd without having some way of explaining that, but the quality of the themers more than made up for the initial confusion.
• So many of the 8s were within unusual sequences of letters. It's easy to see the ATE in THE FOURTH EST(ATE), not so much in XR_D. Oh man, that looked bizarre! I was sure I had something wrong, and it was such a nice victory when I figure out it was XR(ATE)D.

There are going to be folks on one end of the spectrum who think this is too easy; that they've seen stuff like this before. On the other end, some newer solvers will never figure out the connection between 8 and ATE. You'll never make everyone happy, but this one did a great job hitting a middle ground. All of Joe's time and effort showed through, both at making his theme feel elegant and at assembling a colorful, clean grid.