Stephen McCarthy author page

Hope you enjoyed the letter-moving shenanigans in this one! On the theme side, I came up with the idea to move around vowels first. I wrote a script to find all word pairs that existed in the XWord Info list (thanks!) with two vowels switching — A for E, I for U, etc. (You could probably do it in one line with regular expressions... I should learn how to use those properly!) The resulting word sets were fairly short, and A for O was the only pair with raw material for enough phrases that tickled my funny bone.

I submitted the puzzle with the theme set from the final puzzle plus PACHELBEL'S CONAN, which I clued as the composer doing an impression of the late-night host (yikes!). The editors liked BOOK 'EM DONNA better but felt the fifth themer was too much of a tradeoff for fill quality. An 11-letter answer in the middle of a grid creates constraints.

For fill: if I made the puzzle today, I would try to work in a few more long answers and avoid drastically dividing the puzzle into its north/south halves. Happy with HERDS CATS, but feel the short fill could be snappier.

This was a fun one to make! I hope that you as a solver weren't TEARING OFF the page in a FIT OF ANGER. As puzzle-making ENTERTAINERS, we're just trying to EARN INTEREST, so I hope instead that the EXCITATION of this puzzle helped INTOXICATE you!

Now that it's published, can I SLEEP EASY? YES PLEASE!

Prompted by Jeff's curiosity on the mode of discovery: I found the anagrams by writing a script which combed through the XWord Info word list (thank you!) to identify anagram pairs. It creates a dictionary with keys as the string of letters in the word but in alphabetical order, checking for duplicate keys — which are anagrams. I did it in R but it could be easily done in Python for example.

Then I looked at that lengthy list to manually identify interesting combos. Didn't know what I'd find at first — I ended up making two puzzles, the Sunday size you've seen which was obviously accepted, and a weekday one with "antigrams" (opposite-meaning anagrams) which was absolutely fairly not accepted. I also found a lot which were interesting but didn't say "put me in a puzzle!"

Hi all! Excited to debut, especially with this puzzle in tribute to my home country. My American test solver Alex said the Canadian focus made it more difficult for him, so now you know how I feel with every other NYT crossword!

This was the first 21x21 I attempted, and unsurprisingly my first submission left a lot to be desired. I'm grateful to Will and the team for taking a shot on my theme (and grid art) and encouraging me to re-design and re-fill the grid, then providing feedback through a few iterations.

I'm a bit disappointed that I couldn't think of a clever title for this puzzle — though I did enjoy my tongue-in-cheek working title, "Polite Hosers" (credit to my friend Sam).

Two themers that got left on the cutting room floor that you can guess for extra credit (answers at the end of Jeff's notes below):

• "Trooper hit often played in stadiums"
• "Critically acclaimed Margaret Atwood novel"

Finally, to my Canucks out there: yes, I know our health care is not exactly free. Forgive me!