Diane Roseman author page

Happy Passover!

It's so exciting to share a byline with my oldest son, Zachary. This is my first and his second puzzle published in the Times, and Zach has a few more that have been accepted for future publication. While both our names are on the byline, Zach should get almost all of the credit — it was my theme idea, but the puzzle would never have been created without his guidance and hard work.

The whole family was involved — my husband Steven helped by writing a computer program to spit out all of the possible country combinations (guineabissaudiarabia anyone??), and Zach's three younger siblings all helped along the way with the fill and clues. Maybe someday we'll get a puzzle accepted with the whole "Spitz/Roseman Family" credited!

The idea for this puzzle came to me almost seven years ago — I was taking a crossword puzzle construction class (yes, there are such things!) through the Cambridge Adult Education Program — with the accomplished puzzler Brendan Emmett Quigley. The class was filled with smart, motivated people, and I was very intimidated — they made it look so easy.

The goal of the class was to come up with a puzzle theme and then work on the fill together, and hopefully, submit it to the New York Times by the end of the class. My theme wasn't chosen, though, and I wasn't motivated enough to work on it all by myself once the class was over. So it sat for many years until Zach got interested in puzzles and I begged him for help. We first submitted it almost two years ago, and it was rejected. But before Zach went off for his second year of college he looked at it again and resubmitted it, and it was accepted. Patience was rewarded, for sure.

I first started doing puzzles with my grandfather David Heller, who was a soft-spoken man but showed me a very different side as we sat and did the Sunday puzzle together and he (not so) quietly cursed Eugene T. Maleska. My mother and sister have long been puzzle-doing companions, and Zach also benefits from the rabid Scrabble players on his father's side of the family — they are a ruthless bunch.

In our immediate family, the daily puzzle is divided among various family members — and some of the most amusing fights in the house have happened when Ella, our youngest, has come home from school and saw that someone added words to "her" puzzle day — amusing for the parents, at least! Once everyone has smartphones, I gather they'll be solving alone in front of screens, which seems a little sad. Some families have beach houses or real estate fortunes to pass down, but ours has the love of words, and has lots of fun playing with them together.

Enjoy!