New York Times, Tuesday, May 27, 2014

This puzzle was among my first ever constructed, back in 2010. Its first iteration included BANKNOTE, FIELDWORK, and OVERHAND among seven theme entries and the revealer was the plural BOOKENDS. The construction featured elegantly crossing theme entries and had the revealer located in the southwest of the grid. Ultimately the grid proved to be too difficult to fill reasonably, and so it was back to square one.

Round #2 scaled things back to 6 theme entries. The revealer was slightly modified to BOOKEND, and placed in the center of the grid. I submitted this grid and was pleased to learn that Will liked the puzzle enough to publish it, contingent upon my willingness to fix it up a bit. DOUBLEDATE, wouldn't fly since DOUBLE BOOK would be the only verb among nouns, and thus presented a nasty inconsistency. Back to the drawing board again.

For Round #3, SCHOOLWORK replaced DOUBLEDATE to allow for consistency and the grid changed considerably. Wasn't too happy to have to rely on fill like YEGG, SSTS, and AMAT. However MASSE and DETROIT being amid the grid soothed the concerns of this pool-playing Michigander. Hope you enjoyed it.

"Both words can follow X" type theme today. Impressive that James manages to fit seven themers into one grid. For a theme type that's heading toward being overdone, it's important to stretch for something extra, so it's great that James took the extra step.

For a long time, "word that can follow X" themes were commonplace, but they've fallen out of favor as crosswords have evolved. "Both words can follow X" were the new innovation to keep the idea fresh, but as with all art forms, crosswords must evolve or risk getting stale.

James does really well to pick in-the-language phrases. Sometimes with this type of theme, the entries sound forced… because they are. Luckily, there are so many words that can follow BOOK that it gives James the flexibility to come up with several good entries. OPEN SOURCE is a nice, modern term (I wasn't sure if SOURCE BOOK was an actual thing, but Google says yes), and FLIP PHONEs are coming back. Retro. Chic. Everyone's soon going to be envious of my Motorola Razr. Just wait, you'll see.

With seven themers, there are bound to be strains on the grid, but James manages to keep things relatively clean. Using a modified pinwheel arrangement (and stuffing two themers each into the NE and SW corners) keeps all the themers largely separated, allowing for more flexibility. The stacked themers are pretty nice in the NE, only A DOG and SLO to slow things down. That's nice work given the heavy constraints up there.

The SW doesn't come out quite as nice, with OON sandwiched between MATCHPLAY and SCHOOLWORK. Most times when you have two themers directly atop one another like this, it's hard to escape with 100% cleanliness. A NOSE and SKAT along with RTS is not ideal. I wonder if moving some black squares down there would have helped — the 3/6/4 word lengths in rows 14/15 add to that south region's difficult level. Perhaps flip-flopping black squares to create 4/5/4 word lengths would have made for cleaner fill.

Overall though, I appreciated the effort to stretch the boundaries of a well-known theme type. And for such heavy constraints, James did a nice job selecting strong themers and wrangling the fill. I was especially happy to see MASSE (a billiards trick shot where you curve the cue ball's path through spin) and its fun clue, given that I used to play four hours of pool a day in college. What can I say, applying English was a lot more fun than studying English.