Ellen Leuschner author page

Day one of "WTF does Jeff know, anyway?" Ellen and I were trading ideas a while back, and she pinged me with this concept. I liked it pretty well, but it felt random to list out a bunch of trucks, guitar brands, etc. I thought it would shine if we could find triplets of trucks or guitars that formed a real phrase. Can you imagine how awesome it would be if "Sierra canyon ranger" were a real thing?

A machinist friend used to say, "Spit in one hand and wish in the other; see which one is worth two in the bush." Aside from the mixed metaphors (and he used a different word following the "s?it" pattern), his point was spot-on: if you sit around wishing for the impossible, you'll never get anything.

Even though I knew the theme when I saw [Buchanan-Duck-Duke], I enjoyed the solve — much more than I would have thought. The clues did make it obvious that something weird was going on, but that was apt for a Tuesday. The fact that Ellen presented four kooky clues to hint at CHAIN, SERIES, STRING, and LINE — all incorporated into in-the-language phrases — still gave me a nice a-ha.

Add in some MAGIC BEANs, STAND TALL, and finish it with smooth as silk gridwork ... this doesn't END IN A TIE. Score is Ellen 1, Jeff 0.

Not all ideas have to be mindblowing and memorable for the ages. This one worked well, and I'm glad Ellen persisted with it.

As we always do, Ellen and I brainstormed for weeks for this one, eventually landing at a spot very different than where we started. The concept of OVER and UNDER phrases, sitting literally over or under their target thing, is a little straightforward for my taste, but Will reminded me last year that a huge chunk of his solvers tend to prefer fairly straightforward themes (read: ones that don't mystify them).

That comment caught me completely off-guard back then. Personally, the NYT crossword first grabbed my attention when someone showed me all the crazy, creative ideas constructors incorporated. But as I thought more and more about Will's comment, I started recalling some of the feedback I've gotten over the years. I've heard from a good number of solvers who finished some of my puzzles — without ever understanding what was going on!

It serves as a healthy reminder that I sometimes try to be too clever for my own good. When more than just a handful of solvers don't figure out what the theme is, that's on me, not on them.

Here's hoping that this one walks the fine line between cleverness and allowing the solver to emerge victorious, with a warm glow of satisfaction.

Took us a while to find enough good examples of the [Double ___?] style — we continued brainstorming for a long, long time until we finally had enough to cull a symmetrical set from. I really like how thorough Ellen is in all of her processes, and I've learned from her rigor.

It's fun as a constructor to push myself, so we tried to work all five themers into a low word-count grid, focusing on getting as much colorful long material in as possible. Entries like TRES BIEN and PEN NAMES and BAD DREAM are fun for me as a solver to uncover, so we placed high value on working a lot of those in.

I made a boo-boo in our first pass of the grid skeleton, Ellen asking me who HENLE was at 7-D. I wondered, who in the world hasn't heard of Don Henle? Turns out that's Don Henley. Drat! So we ended up with a little more crossword glue than I like in that north region — DE LA, BRYN (can only be clued one way), and IS SO — but we felt that overall, the assets in fill outweighed the liabilities.

PEN NAMES was fun to clue, as I love the story of J.K. Rowling writing a new series under a new pen name, Robert Galbraith. "The Cuckoo's Calling" is a well-written hard-boiled detective novel with compelling characters, yet it only sold something like a thousand copies. She eventually got outed, and now it's a major series, each new chapter eagerly anticipated by millions.

Okay, as an aspiring and unknown writer, maybe I hate that story.

So much fun to work with Ellen. She came up with the idea to have a giant black hole in the middle of a grid; sort of a HOLE faux-rebus. I thought it was clever, so we went to work trying to find enough "___ HOLE" phrases for the north and west, and "HOLE ___" phrases for the east and south.

After banging my head for ages, I came to the conclusion that it just wasn't possible. There were relatively few "HOLE ___" phrases, and to group them into triplets such that all the crosses worked proved infuriating. Luckily, Ellen came up with another brilliant idea: all the answers adjacent to the black hole really ought to be "sucked inside," i.e. reversed. Not only was this a cool visual representation of what happens with a black hole, but it allowed us to take advantage of the huge arsenal of "___ HOLE" phrases we found.

Then it was a matter of adding theme density. I thought it would be amusing to have funny phrases around the perimeter like DISAPPEARING ACT, but I worried that there wouldn't be enough apt choices. Ellen came back a few days later with a huge list, most of them of the "wish I had thought of that" variety. (Sensing a pattern here?) Turns out that the hardest part was picking the best ones from the list! Ellen's a hard-working, creative person.

Our original title made us laugh: ONE SINGULAR SENSATION. To all the die-hard physicists out there, I realize SINGULAR isn't exactly the same thing as a SINGULARITY, but we thought the wordplay was too good to pass up.

Our original clue for BLACK (HOLE) was [Giant sucker in the middle of the puzzle].

We amuse ourselves; hope you were amused, too. And if you weren't, I have a few other "___ HOLE" phrases on the list ready for assignment. (WORMhole. Why, what were you thinking?)

Ellen approached me with this idea, and I thought it had a lot of promise. I wasn't at all sure that we could 1.) find enough "___ FIRE" and "FIRE ___" entries, and 2.) arrange them in pairs so that the surrounding fill wouldn't be compromised. Especially difficult given that we wanted the "holes" to not be connected to any other black squares.

If there's anything that drives me, it's a challenge. So I enjoyed working with Ellen to figure out if this was feasible. A key factor was using varying lengths — not just all ???? FIRE and FIRE ???? entries, for example — so that we had a large enough pool of words to choose from. Then it was "just" a matter of trying out hundreds of combinations and black square arrangements to make it work.

Spending so many of our black squares around those two "holes" meant that the NW and SE had to be giant, wide-open spaces if we were to keep to the 78 word max. Fun challenge, and not too difficult if you're okay with a few pieces of Thursday-ish toughies.

Speaking of that, we originally targeted a Thursday-ish puzzle, but Will thought it would be neat to run it as a Monday, replete with a fire visual in each hole. Nice idea, and well worth taking a jackhammer to the NW and SE sections to redo them completely so they'd be Monday-easy. We could have increased the word count past 78 to make it a whole lot easier on ourselves, but 1.) I like a challenge and 2.) I'm stubbornly moronic. Not easy to fill those huge chunks of space without relying on non-Monday bits of crossword glue.

I was glad that Will ended up changing it back to a Thursday, where I think it really belongs.

Ellen has such patience with me. I think it's important to brainstorm dozens, perhaps hundreds of ideas in order to come up with something I feel is really NYT-worthy. We went back and forth and back and forth, trying to come up with a few good Sunday ideas, and each time, a promising idea came up just shy, or we decided that it just wasn't good enough. Weeks, maybe months of headbanging.

But when Ellen proposed this little idea in a short email, I felt sure there was something to it. I worried we wouldn't be able to come up with enough instances that fit the pattern perfectly, but Ellen came back shortly with a promising list. Turns out a computer science background and some query skills comes in handy! I added a few more, we finalized the selection, and off we went.

The grid design was incredibly challenging, and it looked like it was going to be a bear to fill, given all the crossing constraints. We originally tried using standard crossword symmetry, but all the theme answers branching downward made that very difficult. (It might have been possible if we didn't have the theme answers in symmetrical locations, but that felt inelegant.) Mirror symmetry made the layout much more feasible, and also let us place the themers (at least their first halves) in spots of symmetry.

But after putting together a draft skeleton, we weren't sure it was going to fly, given all the crossing constraints. I took a tenuous pass at filling one tiny little section to see if the entire thing was feasible, and after maybe ten hours and many hundreds of hairs pulled out, I emerged victorious. Ka-ching!

Then Ellen politely mentioned that I had entered IS IT REAL, not IS IT LIVE. Into the circular file.

Several dozen iterations later, passing the file back and forth, going cross-eyed with frustration, we emerged from the long, dark tunnel. At revision 43j, it's not the most work I've put into a single puzzle, but it's pretty close.

A really fun time working with Ellen; hopefully the solving experience amuses people!