Sande Milton author page
2 puzzles by Sande Milton
with Jeff Chen comments
See the 7 answer words debuted by Sande Milton.
Sande Milton grew up in Manhattan, cutting his teeth on New York Post puzzles before graduating to the NYT. He received three degrees from Cornell University, in French Literature, Education, and Sociology. He is Professor Emeritus at Florida State University, having taught Educational Policy Analysis and Research Methods. He also consulted on many projects, including holding research seminars in Togo and Haiti for educational policy analysts in Francophone Africa.
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Fun to work with Sande on this one! When I collaborate with a newer constructor, I often end up doing the lion's share of the grid layout and filling, but not this time. I constructed the skeleton, but it was Sande hacking away at the grid, showing me versions that numbered into the dozens. Most of my efforts were just in pointing out problematic spots and giving suggestions on some piece of long fill that might work better than others.
I love seeing that kind of work ethic — many other constructors throw up their hands at my overly critical eye toward grid design, but Sande fully embraced it.
There's a good amount of theme material, what with the 9 — 14 — 7 — 14 — 9 lengths, but it's usually not that hard to work with. The middle 7 is especially friendly, compared to a middle 9, 11, 13, or 15. So typically, I'd be loath to finish a grid like this without at least four snazzy long bonus entries. But the no-I constraint turned out to be tougher than I first thought.
Well, it would have been easy to work in even six pieces of long bonus fill, if we had been okay with accepting globfuls of ELL, RUR kind of stuff. But I had imagined this would run on a Tuesday, so I pushed Sande to keep that glue count down to a bare minimum. I thought he did well in that regard.
Always the trade-offs, though. Maybe we could have made the long slots sing a little better? I like BYE WEEKS a lot, and ELOQUENT is pretty good. But I sure would have liked to get something more out of EQUALLY and SEAWEED (we ended up having to put in cheater squares to facilitate better fill, so these turned into seven-letter entries, which tend to be harder to convert into colorful stuff).
Turns out there are a lot of words and phrases that use the letter I! No wonder it turned out to be so difficult to fill with color and cleanliness. Learn something new with every puzzle.
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Sande comes up with some of the most creative ideas of any of my collaborators. I liked his initial concept of doing something Scrabble-related in a crossword. Having four "racks" around a scrabble board, plus a "bag" made out of black squares (look at the center of the grid again!)? That was pretty good.
Then he came up with the idea of TILES inside the bag, mixed up into STILE and ISLET. Even better!
But I felt like we had to have Scrabble-esque words in the four racks, not what he proposed: any four seven-letter words that would help us produce good fill. I worried that this would kill the idea. Ah well, lots of ideas need to die a natural death.
Then he came back with PLAYERS ANAGRAM JUMBLED LETTERS. Oh so perfect! Now it was just a matter of working up a grid skeleton.
Nothing good by revision 10. Tricky lengths to work with, considering we had to build around that central "bag."
Revision 30? Still flailing.
Somewhere around 50, things started to look up.
Back down by rev 60.
Finally, I thought, what if we punted on a 15x15 grid? 16x15 or 14x16 is no problem for the NYT, but those didn't help. Finally, I tested out a weird 13x17 on a lark and bingo! It all fell into place.
After 40 more revisions.
Thankfully, Will thought he could bend some rules to the get the odd shape to work with his syndication partners. What a relief! Revision number 101, clued and filed as final.
The sight of a single Scrabble TILE will fill me with Pavlovian shudders from now on.