New York Times, Tuesday, May 29, 2018

The theme for this puzzle is not obvious as one is solving (especially given that my original submission had circles around the tripled letters) so I wonder if this will feel like a 74-word themeless puzzle with some after-the-solve head-scratching about the theme. I look forward to hearing how solvers experience it.

There are many fun things about getting a puzzle published in the Times, but perhaps my favorite aspect is the long-distance cluing tutorial I get from seeing the final product. Comparing the clues I submitted to what Will, Joel and Sam ultimately come up with is a great lesson in cluing. The subtle and major changes they make always improve things and point to how I could have clued entries more appropriately or pithily (Me: NOOGIE = Headlock accompanier, often, Them: NOOGIE = Unpleasant accompanier of a headlock). I often give a mental fist pump when a fun or novel clue I spent lots of time coming up with makes it through intact — for this puzzle my fist pump went to LEIA.

Finally, thanks to KID FLASH for being a thing. Not much else fits the K??F?A?? pattern, so this grid doesn't happen without him.

I've seen plenty of triple-letter themers before, most notably employed by a Superman theme. I liked John's take, using TRIDENTS — think of it as TRI D E N T S — as a rationale for featuring triple Ds, triple Es, etc.

I also liked John's unusual grid layout. It's rare to start with a long themer at 1-Across because look what it forces: a big chunk of white space up in the NW's business. That's a themeless-esque swath, rarely easy to fill, especially when already constrained by a long theme answer.

I was all set to give the thumbs-up, what with delightful PARANOIA / ALAN ALDA, and only UNA and COL as prices to pay.

But ... SAAR.

That's one of those words I'd think triply about before including in an early-week puzzle. The crossings are fair, but it's one of those entries that might cause newer solvers a lot of pause. You don't want to give newbies any reason to do something else. Let's get ‘em hooked, people!

Usually, I don't care for long fill in the across direction, as it tends to muddy up theme vs. fill. But today's theme was easy enough to pick out that I didn't wonder how WAR HORSE was tied in. I did have a slight pause to count how many Ts were in the middle of LATTE ART, but that was okay too.

I personally much prefer long fill in the down direction, as it's more easily identified as puzzle snazzification unrelated to theme. I mean, PALME D'OR is great! And BOHEMIA! And … KID FLASH? I can name all four people who have been the Flash in the DC universe, but KID FLASH is only vaguely familiar. Still, I enjoyed looking him up.

There were too many SAAR, ALAI, ERN, SYST odd ducks for an early-week puzzle, but the theme was interesting enough, and the long fill did mostly sizzle. Reasonable balance.

The XWord Info Regex search capability is very useful when trying to construct puzzles like this. Here are the words in our database with triple letters. Many are bogus (thematic) but there are several good entries in the results list. (The number of entries you see depends on your account level.)