Neville Fogarty author page

Experienced solvers are used to seeing rebus squares on Thursdays, where a group of letters share a single box in the grid. My idea for this puzzle was to invert that mechanism: in this grid, some letters occupy the real estate usually taken up by two letters. The grid design has been modified to help solvers catch on quickly; it's still one letter per box, even if some boxes aren't squares. Hopefully that kept the puzzle challenging but fun. I'm grateful to Mr. Shortz and the whole puzzle crew for taking my grid, which I'd bodged together by applying correction fluid to a printout with only squares, and making it work crisply in print and digital forms. And speaking of gratitude: happy Thanksgiving!

My original submission of this puzzle had two major differences from the version you solved today. First, it had the theme entry GOVERNMENT CHEESE; it was changed to GOVERNMENT AGENCY because that answer would be more familiar to more solvers. Second, a particularly gnarly section with the answers MENA/ONER/CCCP lived at the top of the grid; now it's ACTS/IDEA/SCAM.

In making this change, I increased the word count of the puzzle from 76 to 78 words. I appreciate the dialogue I had with the editorial staff, especially their willingness to let me add a couple words to the puzzle to make the experience more fun for solvers.

I submitted this puzzle to The New York Times at the end of April of this year, and I learned of its acceptance in early August. I'm grateful to Will Shortz and his team for accepting this puzzle and the work they put into editing it.

I think a 2011 puzzle by Henry Hook subconsciously inspired today's theme. In each puzzle, the solver is misled by a well established crossword cluing convention. I hope you enjoyed the twist on cross-referenced clues and don't feel too betrayed.

My original clue for TYPO was [Rocks for jocks, maybe], thinking about the usual nickname for Geology 101. I appreciate the musical reference in the revised clue, [Tears for Fears, e.g.], and I suspect more than one solver will write in BAND or TRIO here. Tricky! (Yes, I am aware that Tears for Fears has been a duo for some time, but DUO doesn't fit in the boxes.)

NEVILLE AND ERIK: We don't really know what to say. Our hearts are very full at this moment.

It's an honor and a privilege to work with the Times team, who pushed us to improve on our original fill and preserved our constructorial voice through the edit.

P.S. To all those competing in next month's Indie 500 Crossword Tournament: may God guide you in your quest.

We're both big fans of the Golden Age of Television, so we racked our brains to find some way to sneak a classic TV reference into this puzzle. Should we use Simon & Simon or Riptide in the DETECTS clue? How about the "L" monograms that were SEWN ON all of Laverne DeFazio's tops? We could've asked which cop show was the LEAD-IN to The Love Boat for four seasons. (T.J. Hooker. Duh.) Or maybe a shoutout to our favorite NEMESES, Jo and Blair from the Facts of Life. In the end, we decided there was simply no elegant way to refer to a '70s-'80s sitcom that ran for 9 seasons on CBS and was recently rebooted as a successful Netflix series. Maybe next puzzle!

I wanted to try to bring new life to a familiar crossword gimmick with this puzzle. We see circles in crossword grids every so often to highlight hidden words or letter patterns. Less frequently, shaded squares are used in the same capacity. Why one and not the other? With a theme of "notable Greys," I had a real reason for picking shaded squares over circles for a puzzle. Of course, just because I had a concept did not mean I could execute it, but when I found TV's Dr. MEREDITH Grey inside of HAMMERED IT HOME, I knew that I could actually construct such a puzzle.

Mr. Shortz and his team did a fine job editing this puzzle, including removing the entry AND (now ANN) when I also had A AND E in the grid. That said, one of my favorite clues didn't quite make the cut: [15-year-old video game player?] for XBOX. But hey, you can't be too tricky on a Tuesday!

When I set out to write a themed crossword, I'll often start with the revealer entry, like this puzzle's BED HEAD. But somehow, that was the last bit of the theme that came together for me. When I finally came up with it, I was especially happy to cross it in the center with UNSHORN, playing off of the idea of an unruly mop-top in the morning.

Here's an extra puzzler: an earlier draft of this puzzle featured the clue [Supporter of women's athletics?], but its corresponding answer was changed ever so slightly to improve the grid's fill. Can you figure out the answer to this "cutting room floor" clue and the answer it turned into?

The grid I submitted to Will had a few differences. At 38- and 39-Down, I had ASICS and STEIN, respectively, and at 53-Down, I had ARRAY. I appreciate the change to OSAKA and STRAY, as I think that's cleaner than what I have. And while I feel bad for sticking Tuesday solvers with the crossing of RAO and ROBB, I'm a bit relieved to know that Will and his crack team couldn't get rid of that blemish either!