New York Times, Thursday, March 31, 2016

ELLEN:

It's always fun to work with Jeff. The seed for the puzzle was contranyms, which are words that have two or more opposite meanings. For example, BUCKLE can mean both "fasten" and "come undone". That's hardly where we ended up with our theme, but that's what brainstorming is about.

I love some of Will's new clues. "Mass distribution?" for WAFER or "Current events?" for TIDES. That's good stuff!

JEFF:

Ellen and I have been collaborating for a few years now. We've brainstormed dozens — probably hundreds — of ideas by now, but we've been so selective about what we pursue, only producing six puzzles to date. But Will has taken four of them; a much higher success rate than mine alone.

Says something about Ellen!

I had forgotten how far "off-track" we went from our original discussion about contranyms. That's such a cool part about our process — we almost always land at a much more interesting place, miles away from where we started.

Took us a while to find enough good examples of the [Double ___?] style — we continued brainstorming for a long, long time until we finally had enough to cull a symmetrical set from. I really like how thorough Ellen is in all of her processes, and I've learned from her rigor.

It's fun as a constructor to push myself, so we tried to work all five themers into a low word-count grid, focusing on getting as much colorful long material in as possible. Entries like TRES BIEN and PEN NAMES and BAD DREAM are fun for me as a solver to uncover, so we placed high value on working a lot of those in.

I made a boo-boo in our first pass of the grid skeleton, Ellen asking me who HENLE was at 7-D. I wondered, who in the world hasn't heard of Don Henle? Turns out that's Don Henley. Drat! So we ended up with a little more crossword glue than I like in that north region — DE LA, BRYN (can only be clued one way), and IS SO — but we felt that overall, the assets in fill outweighed the liabilities.

PEN NAMES was fun to clue, as I love the story of J.K. Rowling writing a new series under a new pen name, Robert Galbraith. "The Cuckoo's Calling" is a well-written hard-boiled detective novel with compelling characters, yet it only sold something like a thousand copies. She eventually got outed, and now it's a major series, each new chapter eagerly anticipated by millions.

Okay, as an aspiring and unknown writer, maybe I hate that story.