Will Nediger author page

NANCY: Was the theme idea effortlessly sparked by hearing someone use the theme phrase in conversation? Or did I lie sleeplessly in bed trying to "ideate" theme possibilities as I so often do? It's been a long time since the creation of this puzzle, and I have one of the world's worst memories, so I don't remember the original impulse behind it. I should probably keep a notebook of some sort, but I don't.

I do have a record of my collaborative process with Will, since I never delete our emails in the working out of a theme. This one went at lightning speed with perhaps no more than 2-3 emails between us before we agreed on the themers and the clues for the themes, and Will went off to create his beautiful grid. He is SO easy to work with: never wishy-washy, always decisive about the best of our possible choices when I'm not always 100% sure, and yet at the same time generous, flexible, and totally without ego.

Hope you'll enjoy this latest collaboration of ours.

WILL: As always, I'm grateful to Nancy for her endlessly creative theme brain — this is one of my favorites of hers. I'm also happy to be the first constructor to get multiple F-WORDS in the New York Times crossword.

NANCY: When I consider a theme idea, I always ask myself: Will it provide the solver with any "Aha moments"? How many? How big will they be? That's what I look for as a solver and I want to give that kind of pleasure to others. In a Thursday-style "trick" puzzle, you might be talking about one huge "Aha!" — when everything that has thoroughly baffled you up until now, at last, falls into place. There should be many " Aha moments " in a wordplay puzzle like this one, especially if it's an oversized Sunday grid, there should be many "Aha moments".

One rule of thumb for me: Getting one themer should in no way make getting the next one any easier. Each should provide its own separate challenge. I never want to give away too much. I'm rather mean that way :)

Whatever our theme is or has been in the past, brainstorming theme ideas with Will is always a delight. We both love wordplay, and by the time Will goes off to create a grid based on our theme choices, we're confident that between the two of us, we've come up with the strongest possible choices for that particular theme.

We hope you'll enjoy this puzzle.

WILL: I have nothing much to add that Nancy didn't cover in her notes, so I'll just add that Nancy is always a joy to work with — and her style is pretty different from the sorts of puzzles I usually make, so it makes for a nice change.

BROOKE Will and I started working together more than a year and a half ago and have posted a bunch of indie collabs on his blog — it's both surreal and sentimental that this is our first newspaper puzzle together! We tried really hard to make all the surrounding fill fun (I think it's super cool that the center stack has no 3-letter words intersecting it) and I don't think that can be epitomized more than through Will's inclusion of WERERABBIT.

I could go on and on about Will's contributions to the construction community as a whole through his mentorship of new constructors; the "indie roundups" he posts; and his innovation in the small puzzle space at Vox, with asymmetry, and absolutely mind-boggling thematic feats of construction … somehow while still managing to be a speed-solving icon. On a personal note, though, Will might be the constructor who has influenced my individual construction journey the most and I truly can't describe in words what I owe to him in that regard. He is so supremely kindhearted and open-minded, and the combination of these things made collaborating when I was just starting out feel like a really safe and welcome space to try new things — I can't thank him enough for this.

WILL: I'm very excited for our official newspaper debut, though, as Brooke mentioned, we've posted plenty of indie collabs already. I'm grateful to Brooke for kicking things off with a pristine center stack, and we're both grateful to the editing team, who are responsible for many of the best clues.

I'm gratified by Brooke's comments, but I also want to add that most of what I do these days is inspired and influenced by people who have just started to construct in the last few years and who are already revolutionizing the world of crosswords. And Brooke herself is a prime example — she's come up with all sorts of gridding and cluing innovations that I'd never considered in my many years of constructing. I've learned a lot from our collaborations, and I look forward to many more!

DICK: I "met" Will Nediger by requesting his mentorship, freely offered on a Facebook group of cruciverbalists. That led to our collaborating on a number of already published and pending publication puzzles, and we have developed a pattern for our collaborations, which held in this case. I come up with a theme idea, and related grid entries and clues that I think will make most editors jump for joy, and Will shows me how wrong I am while suggesting how to take my idea and make it ideal.

We then trade back and forth about theme entries within the construct Will has outlined, and when we have an agreed set, Will constructs the grid and locates the theme entries in it. I take the first crack at filling the remainder of the grid, and Will takes my draft and improves it dramatically.

I then take the first crack at drafting all clues. Will revises to create contemporary references for some of the clues, eliminate my tendency toward verbosity, make necessary grammatical changes (co-authoring with a linguist makes one wish he had paid more attention to grammar in grades K through 6), and suggest substitutions where he believes the approach I have taken can be improved. Because his suggestions are always improvements, after his round of revisions, we submit them.

Collaborating with Will is always a learning experience, which is a precious experience for an octogenarian.

WILL: This is a deceptively simple theme — it was much harder than expected to come up with a set of consistent theme entries (brand name + generic product, where both words have sufficiently different meanings in the base phrases, and where the brands are owned by companies with a lot of name recognition). The editing team didn't like a couple of our original options, so they gave us the go-ahead to stick with 7 themers, with a pretty low number of theme squares for a 21x21, which let us focus on keeping the fill as clean as possible. I hope we succeeded!

I was pretty sure the editing team wouldn't keep the clue [Capital in the 21st Century?] for CEE, but I had to go for it anyway. I'm in love with the [Birkin stock] clue for BAGS, though — thanks to whichever editor came up with that gem!

NANCY: I initially had an idea for a puzzle about "spoilers" but my many theme answer ideas were all over the map. Nor did I have a really good method for how to clue them smoothly. I think I remember that I had a lot of cross-referencing between the clue and the answer and that the clues tended to be overlong.

Enter Will Nediger. First, he whittled down my theme ideas to come up with the three that were the strongest and the most internally consistent. And then he found this incredibly elegant way of cluing them: brief, clear, simple, and completely fair. Provoking curiosity but giving absolutely nothing away. When I saw his solution — one I don't think I would have thought of on my own — I may have actually shouted "Eureka!"

My second "Eureka!" was when SPOILER ALERT turned out to have the same number of letters as TOO MANY COOKS. From such serendipitous occurrences comes the untrammeled joy of the puzzle constructor :)

WILL: I'm really proud of the construction and the tightness of the theme here. In retrospect, though, I regret including "spare the rod..." in a wordplay theme (my responsibility entirely, not Nancy's!). I tend to think of it as a quaint saying because it's now widely understood that corporal punishment is harmful and wrong, but of course, it's not entirely a thing of the past — I apologize to anyone whose solving experience was soured by its inclusion.

NANCY: Rebuses tend to be my favorite puzzle type, so in this instance, I consciously went seeking a rebus idea. Using a phrase with "box" in it seemed like it would work well. There were many possibilities, but as soon as "chatterbox" crossed my mind, it seemed that that would produce the most amusing results.

I came up with the three short "chatter" words, but I'm sure there must have been snags along the way in incorporating them into themer answers. (Who can remember from so long ago?) But whatever they were, they did not remain snags for long, because my incomparable collaborator found ways to make everything work as he always does. And, of course, Will also constructed the grid. It was a smooth-as-silk collaboration as it always is.

I will now go and try to solve this puzzle when it appears, avoiding the theme answers and working on everything else — because, being me, I've, of course, forgotten everything else:)

WILL: I imagine CACHINNATE will be new to a lot of solvers. Normally, I try to avoid obscurities, but CACHINNATE is the sort of delightful literary word that I enjoy and that I don't mind including on a Thursday (with clean crossings, of course). If it's new to you, I hope you're happy to learn about it!

On a completely separate note: Nancy wisely talked me out of my half-serious idea of cluing BEN and EKING together as the singer of "Stand By Me." But man, I wish there were more ways to clue EKE.

NANCY STARK: It wasn't until I had finally finished coming up with all the theme answers and all the clues for all the theme answers that I finally got a decent night's sleep. I'd lie in bed in the wee hours, night after night, as random, not to mention ridiculous non-Spoonerisms would cascade through my head. I found myself trying to create a Spoonerism out of every two-word or two-syllable phrase I'd ever heard in my entire life: BOATING VOOTH; DATER ME; COARSE MODE; POLE GHOSTS. What was worse, I couldn't stop. (If you try it tonight, people, I can guarantee you a night of pure insomnia.) My first thought when Will Nediger said he liked the final 18-letter theme answer I sent to him was: Thank God. Now I can finally sleep!!

The one thing you know working with Will is that, no matter how constraining and challenging the theme and theme answers you give him, he'll find a way to build a grid around them. He's a genius in doing that. He even asked me, after I had sent him about four or five 18-letter possibilities and about four or five 14-letter possibilities, whether I'd prefer him to create a grid with four 14s and two 18s or with two 14s and four 18s? Assuming that the latter would be much harder for him, but also more challenging and interesting for solvers, I requested the latter. "But only if it won't be a problem," I said. "Fine," he replied, and provided it with no further ado and in record time. You can see for yourself how good it is. I do hope you understand that not everyone would be able to do that.

WILL NEDIGER: As always with our COLLABs, Nancy came up with the theme for this one. Spoonerisms have been done before, of course, but I quite like these theme entries, because all of them involve spelling changes, adding a little bit of an element of surprise, and because they all came straight from Nancy's own brain. It would've been easy to just look up lists of spoonerisms and find hundreds of possibilities, but these are all originals. Plus, I learned that STEVEDORE is pronounced with three syllables!