Jeff Chen author page

Super fun to brainstorm with Lisa, who solidly understands that landing on the seed of an interesting idea is often a matter of quantity. This DROP LEAF TABLE concept is far, far away from Lisa's original idea, and the path we took to get here reminds me of not all those who wander are lost.

Hopefully, solvers make the connection to the grid art in the middle more directly than that.

And it looks more like a DROP LEAF TABLE than Sauron or Mount Doom.

A few months ago, I was grousing about getting scooped on the BAKINGSTONE minus KINGSTON = BAE find. I thought it might even be a fun, insidery look inside the sausage factory.

Unfortunately, a reader wrote in to let me know that I'd spoiled his crossword experience, since he now would always be thinking about this entry whenever he saw my byline, and knowing of it would feel like cheating to him. He ended up intentionally snapping his three-digit streak of crossword solves, moving on to different activities.

Needless to say, I apologized profusely, and he was graceful in accepting.

After more than a decade of doing this, you'd think I'd have learned everything there is to know, but all I can do is keep striving harder and harder to learn from my mistakes. So, no spoilers from here on out.

Even after a decade of constructing crosswords, I still learn from my mistakes. I learned quite a lot from making this themeless.

Given the ultra-high competition in themelesses, you must do something extraordinary to get noticed. That might be a unique grid pattern, wickedly sharp clues strewn throughout, or a dense packing of star entries that Will Shortz can't help but notice. Best to hit all three marks.

This one started well enough. Playing around with mirror symmetry and a pair of pyramid blocks for a couple of days finally resulted in something that looked both fun and not impossible to fill. The most constrained region was the bottom, with those long slots serving as an inflexible backbone.

After a week of hacking, I landed on ON THE INSIDE / AMERICAN LIT / EXPLICIT CONTENT / CASE INSENSITIVE, and it felt right. CASE INSENSITIVE had great cluing potential, playing on "capital punishment," and EXPLICIT CONTENT made me think about "sworn statements." So I filled the rest of the grid, assuming the clues would gel.

Three weeks and many sworn statements later, I still couldn't phrase my clues to my liking. The best I could do — after nearly a hundred rewrites — was this:

EXPLICIT CONTENT [Warning issued before sworn statements?]

CASE INSENSITIVE [State that forbids capital punishment?]

I figured Will and team would polish these up and call them good. Why didn't I think from the start that joking around about capital punishment would likely never fly? Or spend more time trying to word something much better around "sworn statements" that would actually seem innocently clever instead of a dead giveaway?

I #@!EXPLICIT CONTENT#$! swear, next time, I will.

Shh...

When Michael contacted me for grid help, my initial reaction was that we should change it from a three-letter rebus to a certain four-letter one that begins with the same first two letters. I WISH IT WERENT SO, but when Greenpeace and political canvassers ring my doorbell at 8:30 p.m. when THE BABY IS ASLEEP, I don't hesitate to HASH IT OUT with them.

This three-letter rebus has inspired me to give solicitors three little seconds to run before I actively vote or campaign against whatever they're pushing. There's a reason Michael and I worked so hard to get CRASHHELMET into the grid.

As if I didn't feel old enough, I had hernia repair surgery last year. Whether it was caused by genetics and/or carrying my kids around, it was clearly the latter, and I was thus due some quiet, kid-free recovery time. I should have known better — I hate quiet recovery time. Sure, the first couple hours were nice, but I quickly go batsh*t stir-crazy if I don't have something interesting to keep my mind occupied. So when Lewis emailed me the day after my surgery, I yelled at him to stop casting Unforgivable Curses at me through his Multiverse of Madness.

There may have been some heavy pain meds and Netflix involved.

After I came to, the next few days passed so blissfully, what with the programming optimization challenges, the grid skeleton development, and the process of making the dozens of trade-offs to arrive at a 140-word product that we both liked.

It was all such a treat. Nothing like a complex problem to tackle, to take the edge off stabbing groin pains.

Traveling from Seattle to Bloomington was like taking a WAGON TRAIN when our kids were little. And don't even get me started about the time we were routed through Miami. Talk about FLIPPING A COIN to see who would deal with the FLOOD PLAIN of tears from our toddlers.

Great fun to work with Taylor on this one! Starting with one West Coast state's postal code and ending with that of an East Coast state was a rigid constraint, already making a symmetrical set unlikely. Then, we dared raise the wrath of the great goddess Cruciverba, by desiring the top themer to be WA crossing to a northeastern state, the middle one from OR to a mid-East Coast state, and the bottom one to span from CA to FL or GA.

Thankfully, She is kind and benevolent, the true G.O.A.T., only requiring a minor sacrifice of a GOAT and a LAMA (aptly made up of Louisiana and Massachusetts). I don't play CANDY CRUSH, but I praise the great goddess for making the game franchise popular enough to be SAGA-worthy.

Working with a 14x15 grid is risky since if Will Shortz gives you the thumbs-down, you can't try the WSJ or Universal since they rigidly stick to exactly 15x15. Sometimes you have to give it your best shot and pray, hoping that Cruciverba doesn't yell WANT A PIECE OF ME?

For some reason, I'm craving lamb rogan josh.

Sam is an excellent example of someone who gets theme development. My rule of thumb is that it takes maybe 20 ideas to come up with a glimmer of a seed of a wisp of an idea. Most people fall off well before that point, but not Sam. He regularly sends me batches of concepts, and while I usually craft a response that hopefully sounds more polite than "Bah, humbug!" there's occasionally a peek of notion of a trace of something interesting.

I wish I could say that when Sam sent me this concept, I knew from the start that it would get accepted. I did estimate that there was a 95% chance that some editor would take it, but—

I meant to say that I knew for sure and that everyone should always listen to me.

(I wasn't. They shouldn't.)

It's so much fun for me when a co-constructor's skills have developed to Sam's level. It used to be that I'd always build the grid skeleton, testing it out to make sure it was flexible enough to be filled with color and cleanliness, but Sam is now in the driver's seat. This makes it possible to have rewarding higher-level discussions, like if the cheater square below RIM is worth adding or not.

Or why I can't be Roy Kent instead.

What a shame that there isn't a famous person named JURGEN MAI CHAN. I'm such a fan of genmaicha's toasty notes that I tried to convince Will Shortz that the aforementioned person was a huge baking star in Taiwan.

That almost got us into hot water.

I'm here all week, folks!

Other editors are strict in avoiding long Across fill when all your themers are vertically oriented, so some would call CHEAP SHOT a cheap shot at solvers. Both viewpoints have merit, but in this case, where the circles make the themers stand out, I like having my tea spiced up.

I enjoyed helping Aaron get this one across the finish line. His original submission contained MINT and CHAI, so it was an engaging process of trying to uncover longer options. I TL;DR most everything these days — ironic that the expanded phrase would be so useful.

How could we resist building a puzzle around a KICK IN THE PANTS resulting in a PAIN IN THE ASS?

Yes, Chase and I are a pair of LOST SOULS. And that's the way we like it.

Searching for themers was not an easy process. Chase had originally discovered KICK IN THE PANTS = _ N _ _ _ E R S, which I loved, but we agreed that the others he'd found were just so-so. Some had loose synonyms, like UP IN ARMS = [EQ _ I _ MENT]. ARMS can be a kind of EQUIPMENT, but that smelled like we'd receive a kick in the pants from many solvers. Others felt too easy and/or the phrases weren't colorful enough to be featured as themers. LIE IN WAIT = _ _NG _ R … meh.

Surely some coding could help narrow the search space? Not so much. Maybe if there were a database of linked synonyms, but even then, it would take a lot of detailed code, and I'm sure you'd have a ton of false positives to sift through. There's probably some elegant way to refine this problem, but I had no ace in the hole—

Hey, ACE IN THE HOLE!

HOLD IN CONTEMPT does break the X IN THE Y pattern, but we figured that it could serve as a curveball for those getting too complacent. Heck, when I test solved, I put in AENEAS and PSST and immediately wrote in INTHE in the surrounding squares.

Did I enjoy getting duped? I probably would have if I hadn't convinced myself that [Some time ago] could believably be INCE.

Talk about HOLD IN CONTEMPT.

When Dan approached me with his awesome BET / WEE / NTH / ELI / NES finding, I was enthralled … and skeptical. Laying out a grid that clearly shouted THESE SETS OF BLACK SQUARES ARE LINES, while working in so many short themers, felt like a recipe for gridding disaster. Add in the fact that I didn't see as many fantastic themer discoveries as I thought we needed, and we decided to shelve this one.

A few months later, I thought I had a neat idea: we could feature four of these findings in a 15x15, where the lines made out of black squares completely cut off grid sections from each other. Solvers would literally have to read between the lines to create grid connectivity!

That flopped.

We couldn't figure out how to make the black square lines look like lines, not curves. We'd ask friends to identify the lines, and they'd ask if this was supposed to be some sort of optical illusion. Then they'd point to the grid's outer edges. Or to the worry lines in my face.

Several months later, I ran some code, trying to find additional great answers that broke up in surprising ways. Dan ran some. I ran some more. And it seemed like we were sniffing at the edges of a Sunday!

Or our own butts.

Again, figuring out how to make lines of black squares that actually looked like lines — and were possible to grid around — felt like Cruciverba (thanks for the correction, Bobbie!), the goddess of crosswords, was melting our wings for flying too close to the sun.

TL;DR: twelve Herculean labors later, we presented great Cruciverba with a puzzle featuring black-square-lines and cloaked answers. Phew!

Now to put on this comfy-looking cloak she rewarded us with …

I'm glad I could help MaryLou out with her KETANJI / BROWN / JACKSON concept. When she approached me with it, she had spaced out the three pieces, which was smart for grid layout and fill, but it struck me as disjointed — solvers would struggle to connect the cross-references. Stacking the components felt much stronger, like a single marquee headline, but it sure proved a challenge.

I spent so much time trying to thread AUDIO JACK through the center column, with CARLS JR to its left, but KBJ kept banging her gavel at me. Hopefully, solvers don't struggle with the RIOJA crossings — I can barely tell a red from a white, but I've seen RIOJA enough times in stores that it's at least a familiar string of letters now.

After weaving in a couple of long bonuses like MAC N CHEESE (one of the few things my kids will eat (as long as it's a specific type of mac and an even more specific type of cheese) and STOLEN BASE, which felt ripe for clever cluing, I passed it on to ML to fill out the rest.

I'm still uncomfortable having CLEAVAGE in this tribute puzzle of sorts, but ML had a reasonable point, that the word can easily take multiple other definitions.

Chase and I bounce a ton of ideas off each other — landing on solid crossword themes is a game of numbers. Few concepts bubble all the way up without getting popped at some point, but this simple PIECE OF MY HEART notion felt like it could be a reasonable early-week puzzle.

When Chase mocked up some grid art (squint, and you can see those hearty-clovery triplets of black squares in the center), it felt like we should do it. (Squint harder, dammit!) With a limited set of possible HEART components to work with, it felt tight, and most of those components lent themselves to being somewhat disguised at the ends of phrases.

Given how smoothly all that went, the grid ought to be easy!

Roughly 145.3 hours and two nearly-broken hearts later …

A 15-letter central revealer would have been so much easier than a split 7 / 7. That one central block takes away so much flexibility, especially considering our four other themers are longish. I'm giving Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns a piece of my mind for not titling it "A Piece of My Heart."

Making a crossword theme like this is easy. All you do is write down all 195 world capitals and then see what phrases contain one of the cities, with one of 26 letters inserted into a random position with that city. If you're not willing to search several hundred thousand combinations, that's just plain lazy.

(I am lazy, so our Finder and some Python programming helped streamline the process.)

The K in KA-CHING! was our least flexible option. Jim and I debated mightily — is MARK O'MEARA or CYBERKNIFE a better option? My stepmother has undergone a cyberknife procedure, but I acknowledge that it sounds like a term dreamt up by a science fiction writer who time-traveled from the year of Mark O'Meara's birth.

Jim and I have had many fun collaborations before, but Sunday 140-word puzzles are a major league step up from triple-A 15x15s. It's daunting to fill a grid that's nearly as wide-open as a themeless — while having to work around a full set of seven themers.

I've found that the best approach to guiding along a newer constructor is to create a grid skeleton that chunks the canvas into smaller sections so that each region can be tackled one by one while heavily testing every area until you have 95% confidence that the entire grid can be filled with quality.

So, of course, I sent Jim a 120-word skeleton that was impossible to fill without using ancient Estonian monetary lingo, dropping a casual note that this should be easy for most anyone to fill.

Curious that even after nearly ten years, he's not TIRING OF me yet.

Crosswords are usually built around a set of three to six long theme phrases, taking up a ton of the grid's real estate. Once you thread a few long bonuses through them, then fill the rest of the puzzle with shorter answers, you hardly have to think about the maximum word count of 78. Most of the time, it just naturally happens.

It's anything but natural to work in reverse, starting with short theme answers. It took Bill and me ages to come up with any sort of layout that would place the theme pairs so that the letters C O R N E R S would appear in order. After that, the 78-word limit openly mocked us. Derided us TO HEEL.

ASS SWELL is right.

It would have been a piece of cake to fill an 80-word grid solidly, and we might have appealed to Will Shortz for an exception, but we decided to work to the letter of the law. And oh, those letters were unlawful.

For example, RHAPSODIC was our last-ditch effort to make this darn thing work. Any reasonable entry broke the north or the northeast sections (or both) because it had to thread through not just one pair of intersecting themers but two.

I had all but given up when on a whim, I asked XWI's resident virtuoso musician Jim Horne about the word RHAPSODIC, expecting him to UNRIG and BESTIR me. Thankfully, Jim is full of surprises, saying that it's much more than just an acceptable word, and went on to rhapsodize on its beauty.