Peter A. Collins author page

This puzzle had its start last spring. I was out for a run at my usual pace (imagine a snail dragging the anchor from the USS Constitution) when a much younger runner flew past me. The Tortoise & the Hare immediately came to mind. While still on the run, I realized that the 8-letter word TORTOISE could be spaced out perfectly, corner to corner, within the confines of a 15x15 grid. At that point, I was off to the races — so to speak.

TAKES A NAP and LOSES A BET are a bit loose as crossworthy phrases go. Where does it end? READS A BOOK? EATS A PEACH? TIES A BOW? But I hope that the fact that my two phrases are thematic will make it easier for solvers to afford me a little leeway.

I'm pleased that the terminal E in TORTOISE and SLOW AND STEADY/WINS/THE/RACE share the final square in the puzzle.

Anyway, I'd like to believe that maybe — just maybe — while out for that run, I reached my finish line before that young hare reached his. But alas, not all tales have fabulous endings.

This puzzle started with TED DANSON. I've been a fan of his since before his "Cheers" fame. That reminds me — I should go back and re-watch "The Onion Field" and "Body Heat."

Since this submission was accepted, JANET YELLEN has been elevated to a cabinet position. I was glad to get that little injection of currency in the puzzle. A counterbalance to MICHAEL BOLTON, perhaps.

A little over four years ago, I started writing a crossword puzzle for a local monthly publication called Groundcover News. A couple of years ago, I recruited crossword constructor, editor, New York Times staff member, and fellow Ann Arborite Tracy Bennett to split the duties with me. So now we alternate months, with Tracy often co-constructing with Vic Fleming. What is Groundcover, you ask? From their website, they are an organization "founded in April 2010 as a means to empower low-income persons to make the transitions from homeless to housed, and from jobless to employed." Groundcover vendors can be found on street corners and in front of shops in and around downtown AA. The puzzles that Tracy and I construct are originals, with an NYT Monday/Tuesday level of difficulty. Occasionally the themes are Arbor-centric, but most are accessible to a wide audience. So, if you happen to find yourself in our town, pick up a copy. If you'd like to subscribe or make a donation, visit Groundcover News here.

BRUCE: This puzzle started out as a Sunday attempt named "Flips," with entries like STATE OF MY OWING, MERE DEAD WHEAT (crop circles), and HAVE ME WET BEFORE? (imagine your own clue here). Will liked the two 16-letter ones that appear today but was not keen on the rest. I spent eight or ten hours searching for one more, and with Pete's help we finally came up with one.

It didn't dawn on us until after the acceptance that Pete went to the University of Michigan, and I went to the University of Wisconsin — what a wild coincidence! I decided early on it would be nice to put M's and W's in the grid — we asked Will if he could make two of them red and white and the other two maize and blue, but he did not promise anything. We decided putting FLIPS or SPOONER in the grid was not worth the price of admission.

I always enjoy working with Pete — he and I were childhood friends growing up in the Midwest, and he mentored me when I first started constructing puzzles. As you can see, he is still mentoring me now — thanks Pete!

PETE: Bruce and I go way back. Before he started constructing, he'd occasionally send me theme ideas. Finally, I encouraged Bruce to try his hand at building puzzles himself, and he's never looked back. He's a master of using black-square art as part of his gridwork — as in today's floating Ms and Ws. Our first collaboration (another Bruce brainchild) used black squares to depict a kite and two lightning bolts.

BRUCE: This was entirely Pete's spelling brew — I just got consulted on the fill. I had recently done a Valentine's puzzle that utilized stacked central themers in a 16-high grid, so that seemed like a great way to make this difficult construction symmetric. Even so, this was a tough grid to fill cleanly.

PETE: Yeah, I had the idea for the theme, but I had a heck of a time filling the grid. Those three HEX-on-YOU occurrences really made for some headaches. I finally threw it at Bruce who had the brilliant idea to go with a 16x15 grid. That gave it a little more breathing room (if we can all ignore EOUS — as in nausEOUS). Plus the supersizing enabled Bruce to place one HEX/YOU pairing smack dab in the center of the grid. I think that's a nice touch. So, in the end, the grid is 90% Bruce's handiwork. I think I redid one of the corners — not that I made the end product any better, but so that I could say I had a hand in filling the grid.

Yep. I'm a math teacher. I hope the sight of the six trig functions didn't trigger PTSD (Post Trigonometric Stress Disorder) in any solvers out there. Math seems to be the most visceral subject in the high school curriculum — even long after high school. When I meet adults for the first time and they find out what I do for a living, I usually get a response like "Oh, I really [past tense verb] math!". Your two Mad Lib choices for the past tense verb are "loved" or "hated". I'd say the ratio of those two verbs is about 10 to 1. I'll let you guess which way.

I like that the revealer is LEFT RIGHT, as the trig functions kind of march down the grid in a left-right manner. I even considered constructing the grid so that the trig functions were pushed up against the sides of the grid, but CSC wouldn't play along. I also considered taking out LEFT RIGHT altogether, as it made the fill in the center a little strained. That triple column of RETOW/VIRNA/ENIAC probably has a favorable/unfavorable rating of 200 to 1. Again, I'll let you guess which way.

After this puzzle was accepted, I found out that AXL ROSE anagrams into a rather salacious phrase. Am I the last person on the planet to learn this? I like that he's balanced out by YOYO MA in the opposite quadrant, as sort of a musical counterpoint. Also, YO-YO MA anagrams into "Yo, mayo", but that's not nearly as exciting.

My favorite clue that made the cut is [Where S is …] for MORSE CODE. I hope some folks interpreted the dot-dot-dot as an ellipsis and stopped to scratch their heads for a moment. I also like [Took out the junk?] for SAILED, but I have to admit I used essentially the same clue in an Orange County Register puzzle about a year ago.

Puzzle ideas can pop up in the strangest places. This idea for one puzzle was generated a little less than a year ago while doing the January 25, 2017 Los Angeles Times puzzle by my friend and sometimes co-constructor Bruce Haight. The first two themed answers I got in Bruce's puzzle were LIVE A LITTLE and MEET IN THE MIDDLE. For some reason the VEAL inside LIVE A LITTLE jumped out at me, so I thought to myself, "I see where you're going, Bruce!". I figured there would be various meats (like VEAL) hidden inside longer phrases, with MEET IN THE MIDDLE as the revealer.

As it turned out, Bruce's theme was entirely different. It consisted of five phrases that ended in the five fingers on one's hand: LITTLE, INDEX, MIDDLE, RING, and THUMB. So I took what I thought was Bruce's concept and turned it into this puzzle.

My original submission didn't have circles or shaded squares, but I guess on a Tuesday they're probably necessary.

Well, I'm serving up a pretty standard tribute puzzle today. It's in honor of my favorite movie! I recommend sitting down with a bowl of fifty hard-boiled eggs and giving it I shot. This is an idea that took a couple of years to round into shape. My first few attempts were too jam-packed with trivia from the film — stuff like PAUL NEWMAN and CHAIN GANG — in addition to the quote. Overall, the grid couldn't breathe, so I decided to go pretty bare-bones with the themed material. In the end, I just included the quote and the movie title. Sometimes less is more. Like when Luke bluffs his way to winning the poker game in the bunkhouse, holding a hand full of nothing. But, as Dragline said, sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.

On a personal note, this is my first NYT puzzle without my biggest fan. My dad passed away on August 23 at age 92. Even though his eyesight was failing and his knowledge of pop culture ended sometime around the time Cool Hand Luke was hitting the theaters, he tackled every one of my puzzles with enthusiasm. Our phone calls often ended with him saying, "Hang on a sec" as he grabbed the clipboard on which he did his solving. He'd ask me about the clues he couldn't crack — a TV actor's name, a singer, some recent slang. I'm going to miss those conversations.

Sadly, I've lost a father, and our country has lost another member of the Greatest Generation. He was quite a guy.

Once I had the idea for this puzzle, I had a harder time than I thought I would to come up with expressions of the form FOUR ___, where the second word has exactly four letters and is in-the-language. What made it even tougher is I had the additional constraint that two of the four letters had to be embedded in the long answer (which, in each case, is really a definition of FOUR ___). One other possibility I considered was (FOUR) IRON hooked onto the "IR" in FAIRWAY CLUB, but I realized IRON (without the FOUR) would be a perfectly good answer (definition) of "fairway club" on its own.

I like the multiple meaning of GANG OF FOUR in the context of the puzzle.

I'm happy I stuck with the consistency that in all three instances, the gang of four circled letters is always read clockwise from the upper left. As I was building the grid, I toyed with the idea of having them start in various locations, with some going clockwise and some counterclockwise. Yikes!

Sorry, not a lot of bonus fill. QUIZ SHOW is kind of fun, I suppose.

ROLODEXES. Does anyone use them anymore? Or have they been relegated to US HISTORY (which lies adjacent to it in the grid — please don't ask me why CHEAP DATE lies adjacent to BORDELLOS)?

And is ROLODEXES the correct plural? Should it be "Rolodices," like vertex/vertices? As for me, I still use a Rolodex. In fact, I have one on my desktop — right next to a couple of boxes of Kleenices.

The theme for this puzzle, as thin as it is, came when I heard the phrase GRAB A CAB somewhere. I liked the sound of it, so I began hunting for other phrases with the same pattern. My intention was for this to be a Monday puzzle, but perhaps some of the non-themed vocabulary forced a push to a little later in the week.

My original version included the boxing ploy known as ROPE A DOPE, but the editor thought it was a little inconsistent since it doesn't follow the "verb-A-noun" form as the others do. Once again, one man's striving for variety runs up against another man's longing for uniformity.

Speaking of CHEAP DATE, when I submitted this, CHEAP DATE had never appeared in a Times puzzle before. I thought it would be a nice little debut. But in the time this puzzle spent sitting in the holding cell, CHEAP DATE has popped up — twice. Both times were by David Steinberg.

Happy Halloween! If you were hoping for a spooky puzzle today, I'm sorry.

As is often the case, this theme idea came to me while I was driving my car. I've been known to absent-mindedly shoot past an exit or two while my brain is running through theme ideas and my fingers are tapping out word lengths on the steering wheel.

The day this puzzle had its start, I happened to hear Marvin Gaye's MERCY MERCY ME on the radio. I immediately started to think of other song titles that fit the X X Y word pattern. The next one I hit on was (I'm ashamed to say) the Vanilla Ice "classic" ICE ICE BABY. At that moment, a theme was born.

My apologies to those solvers for whom pop music is terra incognita (I'm looking at you, Aunt Annie). I suppose picking up on the theme will help a bit in filling in the squares, even if you're unfamiliar with the song titles.

Songs that didn't make the cut include the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love" (due to the inclusion of BYE BYE BLACKBIRD), and Van Morrison's "Real Real Gone". In my opinion, Van Morrison walks on water, but "Real Real Gone" seemed even more obscure than the (I'm sure to some) obscure WILD WILD LIFE — which "Real Real Gone" could've replaced from a lengthwise standpoint. I think I had another possibility or two, but I can't recall what they were now. Can anybody think of others? There's a fun party game for you when you've finished bobbing for apples.

For a follow-up puzzle, how about three-word song titles, like "Fun Fun Fun" and "More More More"? I think I'll leave that to someone else.

One last thought: if this doesn't get "Puzzle of the Week" and 5 stars across the board, the election was obviously rigged.

As Vanilla Ice would say: Word to your mother …

This one went through six iterations before it was ready for prime time. The editors even asked me to consider ripping out my NEEDLEPOINT. It certainly constrains the fill near the apex of the SLATE ROOF. I begged and pleaded, and eventually Will and Joel allowed NEEDLEPOINT to stay.

In order to keep SWEET, NEEDLEPOINT, and the angled SLATE ROOF down the center column, I had to fill ??W?LT and ??E?PR. For the first one, the solution I came up with was Patton OSWALT — perhaps not a household name in a lot of households. Joel and I had to twist Will's arm to get OSWALT to stay — and just for the record, we twisted his left arm so as not to impede his table tennis career. For the second, I needed to pull FREE PR out of thin air. I was quite proud of that entry until Byron Walden stole some of my thunder. He debuted BAD PR while my puzzle sat in the queue. Is there a grumbly-faced, fist-shaking emoticon? If so, insert one here.

Overall, I hope the grid has a COMFY, cross stitch vibe to it (IDI AMIN notwithstanding).

There are some things about this puzzle that I really like.

• I like that the sets of circles are symmetrically placed.
• I like that the themed entries (are there three or five? — more about that in a minute) all run through a set of circles, with DOGLEGS running through two.
• I like the atlas-y feeling middle of the grid, with LIBYA, RIYADH, OSLO, MALI, EL PASO, and ERIN.
• I like that I no longer play golf, and now have a hobby (crossword puzzle construction) that actually pays me a little bit of money.
• I like that I was able to fit the names of my three children — ELIE, ESME, and ESAI — in the grid. (By the way, the baby's on its way — ELKE if it's a girl, ESAU if it's a boy?)
• I like that, in the spite of the presence of ELIE, ESME, and ESAI, the fill was not too ugly, given that diagonal entries often put a real strain on a grid.

Now, about those themed entries. DOGLEGS and GOLF COURSE are certainly legit. What about LADIES TEES? They're definitely on golf courses, but they don't really have anything to do with doglegs. I also have the symmetrically placed ON A PAR and CARDED in the grid. Themed entries? If so, they're very, very weak. "On a par" has nothing to do with golf, other than sharing the word "par". "Carded" could be clued in a number of ways. I chose to clue it (and Will & Joel chose to keep it clued) in a golf sense.

I hope this gets you ready for the Masters, which starts in a little more than a week. I don't care much for golf on TV, but that course is so gorgeous, I often tune in for just a peek.

Into which category does the theme of this one fall? There is no wordplay in the usual crossword sense — it's the location of the themed entries that gives them relevance. Is there a name for this kind of puzzle?

The theme has quite a lot of three-letter answers (25), which was necessitated, to a large extent, by HORIZON and its neighboring black squares in the center of the grid (forming a visual "horizon," I hope). Will and Joel asked me to rework the grid to try to lower the three-letter word count, which I did. However, in the end they thought the fill in this original version was significantly superior — enough to counterbalance the short-answer overload.

When first constructing the puzzle, I tried to include additional themed material — CLOUD and SHARK in the top and bottom rows where BRAWL and RATTY are — but that's when the fill really started to groan.

I'm happy to debut NO CUTS today. I don't know about you, but the phrase always immediately transports me back to waiting in the lunch line at my junior high. Ahh, I can practically feel the wedgies and the noogies ...

And, honestly, I didn't intend for poor Amelia EARHART to end up nose down in the SEA. In fact, it didn't dawn on me until well after I'd finished constructing the puzzle. Yikes! But I decided to leave her there. What? Too soon? At least she took a HIPSTER down with her.

The original version of this one had BALTO TO TOTO TOME at 17-Across. That would've led to the tighter clue "One volume of the Encyclopedia of Movie Dogs?". Unfortunately, Will thought Balto was too obscure in his own right (as the hero of the original Iditarod), let alone as the star of the 1995 animated film "Balto".

That film was getting heavy rotation in the Collins VCR back in the day, as in the late ‘90s our four preteen girls were deep into a) dogs, and b) animated movies. About that time our family was passing through Cleveland on our way home from a family reunion. We stopped at the Natural History Museum. Imagine our surprise when we turned a corner and stumbled upon the real Balto, stuffed and standing in a plexiglass box. Our youngest daughter flipped out. Why a famous sled dog from Alaska ended up in Cleveland is a mystery to me. There's also a Balto statue in Central Park in New York. Another mystery to me.

If you were really to make one volume of an encyclopedia of Movie Pets and Sidekicks from Tonto to Toto, I think you'd have a hard time filling an index card let alone a tome. Therein lies the humor, I guess.

This puzzle was finally accepted last February. After a second and third revision (both involving TONTO for BALTO), it was decided to revert back to the second version. The third version had fewer three-letter entries, but overall the fill wasn't as good.