New York Times, Thursday, March 13, 2014

I don't quite remember exactly when this theme came to me, but according to my files, my original draft dates back to March 2013. That original draft was not as good as what you now see; BLACK OPS / EIGHT BIT was there, but opposite it was NINE IRON / BLUE NILE, which is not very elegant because of the differing lengths of the colors and numbers as well as their positions in the entries. The other themers were even less elegant, as they were not directly on top of one another (I had been working with horizontal themers up to this point): TEN SPOT was at the right of row 5, and NO TURN ON RED was at the left of row 6. Yes, TEN was right on top of RED, but now BLACK OPS / EIGHT BIT was the only theme pair that was not "number by color" (the other pair was ONE SHOT DEAL / FAKE TAN).

A few months later, I tried it again, and it was a step forward, but it did take some more drafting after that to come up with this grid. Even after it was accepted on January 16, I continued to play around with it, but now that it is in the New York Times, I am very satisfied with my work and Will's. Will did a great job with the clues (I loved his clue for MARGIN), but his biggest contribution was making the themers vertical — much more appropriate considering the revealer. Wish I'd thought to do that, having liked Joe DiPietro's "Bywords" a few months before it all started for this puzzle.

I hope you all enjoy solving it as much as I did making it!

Heavily constrained construction today, with a very neat revealer: COLOR BY NUMBER. Alex, a young constructor still in school, had contacted me about this puzzle a few months ago, and I thought it had a lot of potential. Glad to see that he made it through Will's gauntlet.

I liked very much how structured the themers were, i.e. the number and the color were always a matching length. It would have been much easier without that constraint (for example, being able to put ONE next to BLUE), so I'm glad Alex took it upon himself to shoot for the stars.

One question I asked him as we went back and forth on this: why those numbers, and why those colors? Specificity makes for elegance in crosswords, so it would have been really nice to have some pattern built in, i.e. TWO FOUR SIX EIGHT or ONE TWO THREE FOUR. I had suggested to Alex maybe trying it as a Sunday-size puzzle, perhaps with all the numbers one through ten, or with some rationale like one through seven coupled with the ROY G BIV colors. I don't know if that would have been possible though.

Note the central themer, which effectively divides the puzzle in half, left to right. Alex further ups the ante by using pairs of longish themers, forcing a extremely difficult construction, with effectively four tough-to-fill chunks of grid. Just looking at the white space in the NW and SE corners makes me shudder. I had suggested using cheater squares to smooth out an earlier version of his puzzle; glad to see a few in there. Much better than in the previous version!

What with the difficult constraints, I think Alex did a nice job in filling his grid. Aside from the handful of stuff I could overlook given the tough constraints, the one spot that jumps out is in the very tough NW corner, AVANTI crossing ANENT. I don't mind AVANTI at all, given that it's a real thing outside of crosswords, but ANENT falls in the ADIT camp to me — I used it once for Rich Norris (editor of the LAT) a while back and regretted it after sending it in; thankfully, Rich kicked it back to me saying ANENT was just too far off the crosswordese charts. Especially with its opaque clue, [Re], it was a tough section for me to solve.

I appreciate when constructors experiment, trying to achieve something not done before. If nothing else, it stretches the limits of possibility, potentially sparking new ideas to come.