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I first tried this puzzle on Peter Gordon in March of 2012. He liked the theme idea, but didn't like that every theme entry would take the same form. I tried sending it to Will in July of 2012: he liked the idea more, just asking me to improve the fill in places. After a couple of resubmissions, he accepted this puzzle the same day (in the same e-mail, in fact) as David's and my recent Crossword Centennial puzzle.

I don't remember where the idea came from, but I was really glad I could use 51 Across as a theme revealer (my original clue was "Taking liberties ... as with this puzzle's theme"). I'm also interested in seeing how 8 Down will be clued: a straight (if somewhat racy) definition, or a reference to the 45 year old hit song? Also, I couldn't resist referencing Stan Newman's book Cruciverbalism to clue 52 Down...I'm guessing that clue will be changed.

– puzzle by Todd Gross

BARRY: TWITTERVERSE was the seed here. I also thought EXPEDIA would make a good Scrabbly entry, despite it being a brand name. We went through a few drafts before settling on the published grid. The first attempt used TIMEOUTS in the NE corner, which had to be changed because we eventually incorporated TIMELAG into the SW. So Brad replaced TIMEOUTS with WIPEOUTS and made some other changes to the NE. There were a couple of other words I wanted to use in the puzzle that would have been debuts for the NYT, but they had to be removed for other reasons. I thought LIBRARIAN would be fitting for the puzzle given Brad's profession. He clued the Downs and I did the Acrosses.

BRAD: Barry sent me a sizable section with his two nice seeds, plus a nice shout-out to my day job! I was merely glad to be able to make my own 12-letter seed work with a fairly nice stack of 9s. If memory serves me, I think we both did some tweaking to the corners with the shorter stacks. Using WYCH ELM reminds me of the second or third puzzle I ever did with Doug Peterson, where he used a variant spelling and we got by with it. I didn't know either spelling existing before that time! And I don't know if we're the first clue-writers to reference Hitchcock for 2-Down, but it may be a fresh angle for many solvers. I may have used that clue in one of my online self-edited puzzles.

– puzzle by Barry C. Silk and Brad Wilber

This is my third Times puzzle, and the first to appear on a Saturday. When I constructed this puzzle in late 2012, MTV's "Jersey Shore" was still a big pop culture phenomenon, and the show had been referenced a couple times already in the Times crossword. I realized that nobody had used DJ PAULY D as an entry and I thought it would make a good themeless seed because of the interesting letter arrangement, especially the DJP trio. To my chagrin, "Jersey Shore" concluded its run after I submitted the puzzle, so some solvers may find the entry a bit dated — them's the breaks.

Often when I make themeless puzzles, I put in one or two 15-letter entries, but in this puzzle I wanted my grid design to highlight 9- and 10-letter entries. I was happy to be able to get in answers like ADORKABLE, THE CAPITOL, PARK RANGER, and STONEWALL without compromising much of the shorter fill. Finally, CODON puts a nice personal touch on the puzzle, since I'm a biochemist in my day job.

– puzzle by Kyle Dolan

The first puzzle I ever sent to the New York Times was so God-awful it's amazing Will Shortz didn't tell his people to throw anything else from me right in the trash. Check this beauty out:

Clue: _X_VMDCCIIII (16,704)

Answer: MXLIIIITIMESXVI

Hoo boy … Anyway, over the next year and a half things got better and better, yet I still received those emails from Paula Gamache ending "He did appreciate seeing these, tho." Then about a year ago Will wrote that he liked a Sunday of mine but wanted to talk about it on the phone as there was just too much to discuss in an email. So I got to talk to Will Shortz, which was quite a thrill! He told me he "liked the puzzle or we wouldn't be talking now" and went over two or three things he'd like changed to improve it. After a few weeks I emailed him the new puzzle with the changes he'd requested and got a reply that the theme now looked solid but he had issues with some of the fill in the southeast and southwest grids. After re-doing those two grids yet again, BANG, my first puzzle accepted (though third to see publication).

I'm very curious to see what Will did with the southeast grid. As I wrote to him, I wanted that section to be so difficult that without knowing the answers to the Clue accusation not even fastest-solver-in-the-universe Dan Feyer could solve it in under 10 minutes; yet with the answers to the Clue accusation entered (around 35% of that grid) it would become typical Sunday-hard. I felt this was necessary because, if people were able to figure out the accusation by solving the SE quadrant before the other three, then what was the point of the puzzle? I wanted solving the other three before the SE to be of paramount importance.

– puzzle by Alan DerKazarian

Sam:

To my knowledge, this is the first puzzle I'd ever had accepted by the New York Times, so it has a special place in my heart. I fell upon this kid-friendly theme after multiple attempts of trying to satisfy Vic with good theme ideas; even though I was merely a newbie at this point, I had a good feeling about this one's development. Sure enough, my mentor gave me a thumbs-up, and we proceeded with construction. Vic was excellent at explaining grid design, and guided me through creating an initial grid, fill, and clues to submit to Will. Months later, Will requested a revision, so Vic designed a new grid with fill and sent it over to me. I tweaked the fill (especially in the bottom right) and clued the puzzle. Vic revised my clues, and the rest is history! It's been a pleasure working with Vic and I can't thank him enough for his mentorship.

Vic:

Sam's right — and he's talented and has been a joy to work with. He was 16 when he made this puzzle. I'd been mentoring him for a few weeks. He developed the theme. I helped a bit on construction and fill. We submitted it Feb. 17, 2012. At that time FANCY PANTS was in the theme rather than BOSSYPANTS.

On June 26, 2012, Will told us the theme needed a "revealer of some sort." We went back to the drawing board and emerged with NICKELODEON across the center of the revised product. On March 25, 2012, Sam had a solo-byline Sunday puzzle in the Los Angeles Times. Also, while we were revising SPONGEBOB, we were at work on a themeless that appeared in the Times on July 28, 2012.

– puzzle by Sam Ezersky and Victor Fleming

This puzzle started with the bottom stack, a lonely orphaned 4x15 sitting in my file of unfinished projects. The problem was that any potential top stack was going to be quite restricted, by the symmetry created by the bottom stack. After a couple of months, I decided to try the ultimate stack-maker's "cheat": loading up the bottom row with esses. So after grappling with my conscience for a full three or four nano-seconds, I hit upon STEMLESS GLASSES. If most of the Downs (through the top stacks) had not been rock-solid (with the sole exception of CTNS) I would have abandoned the STEMLESS GLASSES route and gone back to the drawing board.

This, as is so often the case, created a whole new set of problems: I couldn't for the life of me get the centre of the puzzle to work, unless I enlarged the grid and made it a 15x16. To make matters worse, PALESTRINA had to extend into a relatively obscure Haydn opera LA CANTERINA.

And finally, what I needed was a good LOGS??? entry to match a potential ???GUTS at the bottom. Unfortunately I had a mental block, thinking of only computer-related LOGS OUT, LOGS OFF, etc. Finally it dawned on me that those LOG SHIPS that sail up and down the (Juan de Fuca) strait less than a 1/2 mile from my house might come in useful (I live in British Columbia; major export = logs)!

Keen-eyed observers will notice that I've developed an obsession with circus elephants. Last month, I gave you TRAINED ELEPHANT, and today it's ELEPHANT TRAINER. I'd love to say this is a super-duper circus theme that'll run though my themeless puzzles, but alas, I cannot. These puzzles were constructed over two years apart, with dozens of other puzzles written and published in between, so the mini-dupe caught me by surprise when I noticed it a few days ago (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!).

Finally a shout out to Kevin Der for paving the way back in 2010, by getting the whole double-quad-stack thing going. Coincidentally CTNS was also a stack-crossing entry in Kevin's pioneering puzzle. So you can think of CTNS as my tribute to Kevin Der, or maybe just a poor 4-letter fill word I'm desperately trying to justify using!

Anyway, I hope you'll find the rest of this puzzle, minus the circus elephants, trainers, and CTNS an enjoyable and challenging solve!

– puzzle by Martin Ashwood-Smith

Last year, I was creating a game called "May Own A's," for the 57th Equinox word-game party in Berkeley. (That party's theme was condiments, naturally.) When I found that glorious 21-letter "backward-gram," I knew it was meant to be a Sunday Times puzzle instead. The idea of the theme extending to the clues themselves felt fresh enough to take seriously.

This was the first crossword I ever sent to Will, so I wanted it to be unimpeachable. Thus: many, many versions and revisions. Tyler Hinman graciously provided many rounds of feedback — laser-focusing me on clean, fresh, quality fill — and convinced me over and over to kill my darlings, in order to root out yucky partials and other woeful entries.

In one version, the SW corner had OBIWAN and YODA, which I desperately wanted to link to my STAR WARS entry elsewhere... Had to kill it. A later version had SHORTZ there instead — meta! — but it crossed with the unspeakable OGPU. Tried a few full-pangram versions, but the fill suffered. Knocked the puzzle down from 142 words to 140, removing 8 blocks in the process.

The theme clues I submitted to Will were ornately A-laden constructions. The STAR WARS clue was the much-geekier "Cash-fat astral saga that has J.J. Abrams (and lacks Khan and Data)." Since J.J. is a puzzle nut, I thought the shout-out would be cool. The BALACLAVAS clue featured Slavs, Tatars, and Kazakhs; the SAND MANDALA clue went to Dharamsala. Will rightly streamlined them — sometimes down to a single, tantalizing word. I trust the Master's instincts completely.

I think my favorite clues are the ones that work in meta-wordplay, like the A MAN...PANAMA clue, which includes another A-only palindrome ending in a country, or those two A-only ANAGRAMS. It felt a bit like George Perec's lipogrammatic novel A Void, where translator Gilbert Adair whipped up an E-less version of "The Raven" ("Blackbird, by Arthur Gordon Pym") and other "highly familiar madrigals." Finding famous A-only films (and a British TV show!) that actually won BAFTA Awards was satisfying as well.

Some other wordplay clues that didn't make it in: "Where Skilling made a killing" (ENRON) is a beheadment; "It turns chefs into chiefs" (AN I); etc. The puzzle's final clue ("Vientiane native") is a letter-bank, for all you NPL-ers.

– puzzle by Andrew Chaikin

Now, this may come as a surprise, but I rather like all the colorful ways in which the English language allows its speakers to express themselves. This puzzle, to me, is a prime example of not only the diverse nature of English, but also the old truism that language is a reflection of culture. Namely, in the case of this puzzle, humanity has seen nonsense in everyday life so often that they have to keep making up words for it to keep from being bored of describing it.

I know it seems that the fill is a little constrained because of the sheer amount of theme content, but I put a lot of constraints on myself from the outset and, I think, minimized the junk given the number of theme squares. I moved the various theme answers around a lot — a LOT — and tried a few other words that just didn't make the cut (TRASH, RUBBISH, GARBAGE, BOSH being some of them) because of the effect they had on the fill. (8 pairs of theme answers mean a lot of permutations!) The only words that I didn't move around much were JIVE and JAZZ, because terminal J's and V's severely limit the options in a grid where my options were already considerably limited. Those two stayed where they were from the start of construction.

On the whole, I was so enamored of all these synonyms for "nonsense" that I felt like I had to wedge as many as I could into this puzzle ... even at the expense of going over the max word count significantly. It was a bit of a gamble to do that, but I'm glad that Will didn't see past all that nonsense.

– puzzle by Tim Croce

I am a perfectionist. My mind fixates on anything suboptimal. When constructing a puzzle, this habit can be helpful as hundreds of judgements are made — whether a partial is worth it, are there too many plurals in the grid, etc. And since a submission can be rejected for a single flaw — e.g. one entry is deemed too obscure — diligence is needed. The trap is that the mind can go too far in this direction, dwelling on the smallest imperfection while forgetting the merits. I once spent days agonizing over a themeless with a single entry I disliked — FDR — before I came to my senses.

The company I work at is researching methods for peer feedback. We learned the greatest factor in whether a team is thriving and successful is the ratio of positive to negative feedback. The best teams used 5x as many positive comments to negative — while average teams only used 2x. Sometimes the human brain works in unintuitive ways. Since then, I've tried to apply the 5x to rule to myself when constructing. It's helped me remain objective about imperfections while still remembering the merits. I've found myself happier and more motivated to construct. As is commonly said, perfection is impossible to achieve.

Onto the puzzle. I became interested in 4-stacks while observing Patrick Berry's puzzles (even his 5-stacks are smooth) and wondered if mere mortals could do it. Began at the top right corner with 6-A and 16-A as fresh entries. 18-A is a plural not ending in S, which adds some nice misdirection. 11-D was a serendipitous discovery for BLACKO??. And I liked some other lively entries in the grid. But I wish I could change KIEL. While not totally obscure — it hosted Olympics events as recently as 1972 — many people won't know it. I personally didn't. For a painful time I considered scrapping the entire corner because of it. Now I feel the grid as a whole is good enough to accept it. Hopefully, solvers will get the crossings and be satisfied by learning a word. Finally, I noticed that Will kept many of my favorite clues, but also changed some to make the puzzle easier. It's helpful to know my instinct is writing clues that are a bit too difficult. Overall, I'd like to improve several entries, but the result is okay and I hope the next is better, even though it will be imperfect.

ADDED NOTE: This puzzle was used in the 2014 MIT Mystery Hunt.

– puzzle by Kevin G. Der

I was inspired to build this Saturday puzzle after reading so many blog comments complaining that my puzzles were too easy. NO JIVE ... not! My true inspiration for constructing this puzzle back in April 2012 was that I had a bunch of 11-letter seed entries I wanted to put into a crossword grid, which included BANANAGRAMS, ADOBE READER, and TIJUANA TAXI. I also had a sizable number of 8-letter entries that seemed fresh, my favorites of which were UGG BOOTS and MEGAN FOX.

My original submission contained the entry TINIE TEMPAH (a British rapper) at 60-Across, which Will felt wouldn't be familiar to the majority of solvers. So I reworked the lower half of my puzzle and ended up with a stack I felt was superior to the original. I particularly loved EJECTOR SEAT and SASHA FIERCE, though I also really liked I LOVE LA, FACEPALM, and IF I DID IT.

The long entries did necessitate the duplication of I in the lower left and a few "meh" entries — I found SRIS, ITES, and SAV particularly irksome — though I was (and still am) happy with how the fill turned out. My favorite clue/entry pair is "Professional organizers?" for TAXONOMISTS, though I also love Will's new clue for TAVERNS ("Round houses?"). I hope you enjoy my puzzle!

– puzzle by David Steinberg

This puzzle originated when I heard "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits on my drive to work one morning. Like any good constructor, I started unconsciously fiddling with the song title, and it hit me that the tune's Spoonerism would be "LOCK OF WIFE." Moments later I had what I thought was the perfect accompanying clue (Chastity belt?) — and after a few days spent developing a list of other possibilities, I was on my way.

Or so I thought. I sent the resulting 21x puzzle to Will Shortz at the NY Times and, after he gave it the thumbs down, to Rich Norris at the LA Times, where it also failed to make the cut. After subjecting their short rejection notes to a level of scrutiny normally reserved for newly-discovered biblical scrolls, I detected just an inkling of interest and decided that one or the other might consider using a revised version. But based on the feedback I'd received, I came to the conclusion — sadly — that LOCK OF WIFE had to go (apparently it would be too obscure for many solvers.) I also jettisoned DUTIFUL BAY (which didn't work, phonetically speaking, since "Beautiful Day" has a "y" sound after the "b"). In their place, I substituted DOWNED HOG as the central entry. With those modifications, along with some resulting improvements to the fill, Will liked the revision enough to accept it.

As always, I was psyched to get a Sunday puzzle in the NYT, but in this case I was also a bit wistful that my favorite entry and clue had to be sacrificed in the process. What did I learn from all this? To paraphrase another old rock n' roll tune, sometimes if you love a theme entry, set it free.

– puzzle by Dan Schoenholz

Pardon my crucinerdism, but I'm totally psyched to have my 10th NYT crossword, which means I get to be on those awesome XWordInfo lists with the cool constructors. WE MADE IT! Squee!!! (uh, I mean WOOT!!!)

Oh, right, the puzzle... I submitted it in April of 2011. Will accepted the puzzle in September, but didn't publish it until now because, well, I'll let Will tell you. (I believe the reason for the long delay is he has a lot of word ladder puzzles waiting to be published, and he wants to space them out. Makes me curious what all those other puzzles are like.) Note: I created this WORD LOOP puzzle well before Ms. Gorski's EDGINESS puzzle was published, so I couldn't LISTEN TO her (and Jeff's) advice. I don't remember pulling my hair out, but I did need to use A TRIP and ADRIP as crossing entries. Sorry about that.

Did you notice that O is the only vowel along the perimeter, and that there are no O's in the rest of the grid? Indeed, if you connect the O's, so to speak, you'll get a shape that looks a lot like an O. And since O is the only vowel in my name, it seems fitting that I would be this puzzle's constructor.

– puzzle by Todd Gross

I've always been very much in awe of past puzzles that contained "maps," and was very interested in the idea of re-telling a story within a puzzle. I hit upon the idea of a trail of BREAD CRUMBS through the grid, and then was delighted to discover that the title HANSEL AND GRETEL was 15 letters long. It was not long before it became apparent what the other theme entries should be. The trouble then became finding a layout and fill that would work well. I went through several drafts before hitting on a solution for the NE corner which allowed me to include the rebus square while still maintaining a recognizable "S" shape with the circled letters. The resulting orientation of black squares I thought was very clean and handsome, and very fillable for the most part.

I will mention for educational purposes that Mr. Shortz was not thrilled with the presence of the central ugly "TNS," but said he could live with it considering the constrictive nature of the placement and amount of theme squares, and the fact that there was no easy way to get rid of it. Hopefully the execution of the theme makes up for this in solvers' minds.

I'm really excited to see this in print, and I hope everyone has fun cracking it!

– puzzle by Jared Banta

The "Wordplay" documentary launched my interest in crosswords, but I never advanced past the "failed attempts on graph paper" stage until longtime friend John "DOUBLESAWBUCK" Guzzetta confided that he was getting published. Not content to let him hold that accomplishment over me, I vowed that day to get serious about crossword construction.

The Missing BLOCKs puzzle was the fourth puzzle I submitted, following three rejections. I was drawn to rebus puzzles, perhaps the result of many sick days spent watching Alex Trebek on "Classic Concentration" as a child. The use of a BLOCK rebus appealed to me since it existed as an element of the puzzle already. I compiled a list of all the BLOCK-related words and phrases and then hit the OneLook and XWordInfo databases to fill in the ones I missed. The perusal of XWordInfo revealed that the idea had been used before, first in 1999 and then more recently in 2010.

I pushed forward with the puzzle anyway, confident that my take on the idea would be unique enough to set it apart. The Thursday, October 21, 2010 grid had a 2x2 block of black squares which represented BLOCK in all the phrases that butted against it. In the Thursday, January 7, 1999 puzzle, the rebus BLOCKs behaved as cheater squares since they were placed against existing blocks and in corners. In my version, I wanted the BLOCKs to interact with the original grid construction, omitting numbering where there was not yet a BLOCK, hopefully to the befuddlement of the solver.

The close quarters of theme answers in the NE and SW constrained the quality of fill more than I would have liked, but there's nothing too egregious. Many of my original clues stayed in, but some were made easier (specifying "Star Wars" for LANDO, e.g.) or harder ("Mendes or Gabor" changing to "Deliver Us From EVA", a LL Cool J movie I barely recall). I was pleased to see that Will kept my "It might be under a tank" clue for BRA and "Mad Men" clue for UTZ, and not at all surprised that the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle" clue for OOZE got the ax. The best edit was "Settings for some escape scenes" to replace the dull clue I had for SEWERS.

It's been a pleasure! See everyone back here in the not too distant future, some Monday, A.D.!

– puzzle by Michael Hawkins

A few years ago I was watching TV and a commercial for timeshares came on. In this commercial the word TIMESHARE is shouted an absurd number of times, as if its writers missed the day in grammar school when pronouns were introduced. And that was it. I wish I could say that today's puzzle has a more interesting, Eureka-esque story behind its inception, but alas, it doesn't. I'm hopeful that, in time, the puzzle will come to accept and embrace its humble beginnings.

So, my first thought after turning off the TV was to have TIME wedged in between its two associated two words, generating wacky phrases. As in AIRTIME + TIMETRAVEL = AIRTIMETRAVEL, e.g. Seemed like a good idea, but the concept never took flight, and I ended up depositing a half-filled grid with the rest of my misfit puzzles.

Months later, bored and looking through my files, guess which half-filled grid caught my eye? I realized (Eureka!) that the TIMESHARE thing could be done in the same way as all of those other two-words-that-have-one-word-in-common themes, but with a little twist. And there you have it.

Nothing stands out in my memory with respect to the actual construction. As a high school math teacher and number enthusiast, I was excited to be able to get FIBONACCI in the puzzle. Also, "Music for Airports" is almost always on in the background when I'm constructing, and so ENO, despite being crosswordese-ish, always elicits a smile.

Hope you enjoyed it.

– puzzle by James Tuttle

I'm thrilled to be a newly published NY Times crossword author, after several appearances in GAMES Magazine and the LA Times. My very first puzzle, however, was a self-published one. In 2000, I doctored an issue of GAMES Magazine to include a puzzle that featured a marriage proposal to the woman I was dating. We would usually spend our lunch hour together working on the daily crossword, so it seemed an appropriate way to pop the question. I hadn't heard of Crossword Compiler at the time and did it all the old-fashioned way, laboriously developing the fill, the clues, and the layout over a three week period. Even at the new and improved NY Times pay rate, my effort probably would have only worked out to about five cents an hour, but the eventual payoff was more than worth it. We've now been married for over a decade.

The first theme answer I developed for this puzzle is still my favorite: PHONE BILBO. ("Give a hobbit a ring?") There had been a lot of buzz in Hollywood about the filming of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, so I had Bilbo on the brain and set about looking for other -BO theme answers. The puzzle was accepted in June of 2012, six months before the premiere, so I wondered if its publication might coincide with the opening. Not the case, as it turned out. But thankfully, Mr. Jackson does love his trilogies, so it coincided with The Desolation of Smaug instead, making for a very memorable first publication for me. Thanks to Mr. Baggins for the idea, Mr. Shortz for the thumbs up, and Mrs. Katy Stillman for saying "Yes" thirteen years ago!

– puzzle by Jeff Stillman