New York Times, Tuesday, July 17, 2018

AMANDA: We'd submitted quite a few puzzles before this one being accepted. The themes ranged from too silly to too familiar. There was always feedback though, from Will, Joel, and Sam, and it was very insightful and encouraging (even for puzzles that now make me wince!) Every "no" helped make the next puzzle just a little better and we kept learning how to make better puzzles. I'd bounce theme ideas off of Karl and he'd often have something fresh that I hadn't thought of yet.

But this puzzle actually started in the opposite fashion, with Karl having an idea and me doing the fine-tuning. I remember wanting entries that fitted the FLYINGCOLORS theme, but weren't just generic flying things. BLUEBIRD was a slight concession, but it also being a "symbol of happiness" helped justify it.

I do love the song at 32-A, and the editorial team's cluing for it! I feel like we've come a long way together and am very excited for our first solo effort to appear here.

KARL: This, our first theme as a couple, was especially fun to work with, snowballing from a morning conversation. With airplanes in my dreams, I groggily mumbled to Amanda something about her being a BLUEANGEL pilot. We bore out a theme with a potential next color-flyer pair: REDROBIN, and from there, we didn't look back. We put a bit of ourselves into the entries, from kicking off with our favorite farm-fresh CA dish in 1-A, to some fun Jackson 5 songs. Thanks to Amanda for being a wonderful and positive partner. We hope you enjoy the puzzle!

Loved this theme! FLYING COLORS = things that fly, all described by a color. This huge GREEN LANTERN fan loved seeing Hal Jordan get his due (although, your weakness is the color yellow? Seriously, you cower in the face of a dandelion?). And GOLDEN SNITCH! It's like Amanda and Karl asked themselves, "What themers would make Jeff automatically give us his POW!?"

BLUEBIRD wasn't as interesting, but I read a ton of "Peanuts" as a kid, and I have a soft spot for Snoopy's dogfights with the RED BARON. it always made me want to go seek out root beer at a French cafe.

Now, the grid wasn't as clean as I want from an early-week puzzle. There was enough SOIRS, AFOG / ALII, NTSB, EDT, that I paused slightly before slamming down the POW! But there is a relatively high density of theme material, not easy to work with a split revealer like FLYING / COLORS in the center, kind of splitting the puzzle in half.

Speaking of that, splitting the puzzle nearly completely in half is another no-no. It forces solvers to do two mini-puzzles — blockages in the feng shui. But, FLYING / COLORS does tie the two halves together a little better, so that's something.

And ultimately, the gluey bits were all minor offenders, many in the name of working in great stuff like CATNIP / OK SURE / WEBBYS — ok sure, that's worth the price of NTSB!

Overall, the theme won me over so highly that the slight dings didn't bring things down much. Such an entertaining solve.

P.S. A friend and I have a puzzle waiting in the publication queue … also based on FLYING COLORS. This is one of the very few times I've wished for the lag time from acceptance to publication to be very long!