David Gray author page

What a nice construction from a relatively new constructor! The 9-letter middle entry makes for a higher degree of difficulty, which is why I usually steer newbies away from doing this. But David does a really nice job filling those big corners with lovely 7's like DAYTONA, E TICKET, INCISOR, AT A TROT, SWEAR TO. Even better, the crosses are almost all smooth. If LEONS is your worst crossing entry, that's a big success.

And the theme is a nice variant on the "word that can follow" type. Typically Will doesn't take many of these anymore since they've become overdone, but David does a great job of choosing fun, colloquial phrases as themers: (SAY) UNCLE, (SAY) NO MORE, (SAY) CHEESE, (SAY) WHAT. I especially like that last one. I'm going to make it my personal mission to indignantly say SAY WHAT? to one person a day.

The one pause I had, the reason I didn't hand out the POW! today: the revealer felt a little strained. Specifically, the three SAYs didn't feel like they matched the four themers. This is a case where I think "less is more" would apply — having only three themers (in addition to SAY SAY SAY) would have felt more elegant to me. WHAT A JOKE 9 could have been the first one, SAY SAY SAY 9 could have symmetrically matched it as the last themer. Anyway, a matter of personal taste.

A final note, look at the word count: 78. A bit surprising, isn't it, given the big open corners? If pressed to guess, I would have said 76, maybe 74, but there are a lot of short entries in the middle of the grid that I didn't notice (a good thing!). I think many ambitious constructors would have cut down the word count to 76 (by taking out the black square between KEG and SELL) or 74 (by taking out the black square between EGO and AKA) but David chose not to. I think that's absolutely the right decision for a Monday puzzle, for which smoothness and lack of crosswordese are two of my greatest desires. Very well done.