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I knew I wanted to make a rebus puzzle using "Back in Black" so I started by experimenting with some 15x15 grids. None of these really worked, however, as there just wasn't enough room to cram in the revealer and a bunch of theme answers, so I started thinking bigger! I'm not sure how I came upon the idea of bisecting the grid into two halves and using the BACK rebus to allow the solver to jump across the divide, but it worked beautifully, allowing for some lengthy BACK answers and for the shock value of a puzzle divided in two. I'm sure some solvers were thinking, "Well, how the hell is this going to work?"

Anyway, the puzzle was brutally hard to fill in 140 words or less and there ended up being a lot of funky looking black patterns all over the place. Will said he liked the theme but "would I like to have another go at the fill?" I was having the same problems on the second attempt when suddenly I had an epiphany. "You idiot! The words before and after BACK don't count as two words. It's all one word!" I was trying to make a puzzle with 132 words, not 140. Once I realized I could let Crossword Compiler tell me my puzzle was 148 words instead of 140, it made all the difference in the world.

One quick note on what is sure to be the most questioned answer, DENTALCARIES. First, it really made that section hum; I wouldn't have used it if I didn't have to. Second, if you go to Wikipedia and search for "tooth decay" you come to an article where the main heading is "dental caries." That was good enough for me. I was still worried about it, though, but it seems it was good enough for Will, too.

– puzzle by Alan DerKazarian

Making a Monday puzzle is harder than it seems. It must be interesting enough to pass the increasingly high standards of the NY Times, but simple enough that a beginning solver can still master it. As a lifelong resident of Ithaca, NY and a graduate of Cornell University, aka "Big Red," I also attended our local high school which is known as "Little Red" and so have long held a certain affection for the "Caped Crusader" of fable. The idea of using a book, song or movie title and breaking it up into pieces is one I have used often. I fact when I am going through a dry period, I can usually count on this technique to generate another puzzle and keep the creative juices flowing. The theme is not terribly original, but the four themed phrases seemed to flow pretty naturally. Throw in a big bad wolf and, well, you're practically out of the woods!

Bio: Adam Perl is a graduate of Cornell University with a BA in music. He has been the owner of Pastimes Antiques in Ithaca NY for 35 years and has constructed well over a thousand crossword puzzles. In addition to making puzzles for the NY Times and various other publications, he loves to make custom crossword puzzles for friends, family or for hire. Last year he created three different difficulty-levels of crosswords for the first ever Finger Lakes Crossword Puzzle Tournament which raised money for the Tompkins Learning Partners, which tutors children and adults in reading and math.

– puzzle by Adam G. Perl

This is my second NYT puzzle, but it's been since 2009 since the first. This really simple little puzzle really took a lot of practice to achieve, mostly in favorable grid design, but I've been building word lists and applying theory like maximizing the freshness of my long non-theme entries. TALLINTHESADDLE was actually the seed of this puzzle that didn't persist because, unlike the present set of five, the theme word in the idiom is at the end and it doesn't change meaning from riding gear.

I really wanted to use ALLHOPE instead of AIRHOSE in the triple-crosser central entry. Fancying myself as a bit of classicist, I felt freshness in this entry that has been around for thousands of years. I thought my clue of ("It should be abandoned by "ye who enter here") made it stronger. In retrospect, I agree it's not recognizable or strong enough to warrant a seven-letter partial phrase. My initial grid also had IATRO and PDR in it. As a physician, these seemed to me to be "in the language." My wife tells me "not so much." This has always been a stumbling point for me — recognizing that just because I love it doesn't mean anyone else will.

It was great to be allowed input in the editing process by Will. In a couple of volleys, he expertly nixed the above as well as the foul fill PTL and BCS. BCS allowed HOTCHICKS instead of TOOTHACHE, but so goes the reality of crossword construction.

– puzzle by Phil Ruzbarsky

I started making puzzles ("puzzin'") back in college with my good friend, Ashton Anderson. After some growing pains, we had a collaboration puzzle published on a Monday back in 2009. Following that, Ashton switched his attention to themeless puzzles, while I switched mine to altogether less important things. The constructing bug bit me again back in 2012, though, and I began trying my hand at themeless construction, which led to this puzzle (and a few more in the pipeline, including some co-constructed with Ashton).

This puzzle is brought to you by EMMA STONE. A friend of mine is a big fan and encouraged me to feature her in a puzzle. I was also pleased to have PROACTIV, BUG ZAPPER, GLEE CLUB, BOOK SMART, SANDAL TAN, and JEZEBEL in there. Somehow, these answers hit a sweet spot for me. They're evocative, modern, playful, and surprising, to my ear at least. It's difficult to pin down or articulate this reaction, but it's what makes me love crosswords, and particularly themeless crosswords.

I find the crosses in the NW interesting, and I'm eager to get solvers' feedback. It's quite a pile-up of names (5 of the first 6 downs!), but given that they are all from quite different parts of culture, I thought it wouldn't distract. I hope that's the case.

I'm honored to have this puzzle in the Times, and I hope everyone enjoys the solve.

– puzzle by James Mulhern

Thanks for the blog invite Jeff and Jim! First off, in case you didn't know, this site is awesome. I've used it to construct every one of my published puzzles ... er, that would be 2 now. Funny aside, this one was actually the first of the two that Will accepted. My debut puzzle took only 2 months to publish at the end of last year. This quote-style theme sat in the hopper for 16 months!

When I read this quote in a trade journal early last year, it was the first time I'd seen it. As the co-owner of a small nanotech firm, I related instantly. Einstein probably never encountered the modern day phrase we use for his "absurdity": brainstorming meeting! I'm sure he participated in many, though. Picture Einstein and colleagues pontificating around the chalkboard, "NEIN, ALBERT, that's just ABSURD!" Amazing to think of the volume of absurd figments that must have crossed his mind, yet didn't stick as well as special relativity and E=mc².

Construction of this puzzle happened quick — just 3 hours to finish. I was even able to nestle both first and last name nicely into the southeast without the fierce battle that usually accompanies stuffing more theme into an already high density (RHO) grid. It took great INSIGHT to work in a constructor's dream Scrabble score name like EINSTEIN! Also, glad to usher BORDELLO back into the Shortzian puzzle era.

Hope you enjoyed the solve, and for the record, your next ABSURD thought today, well, ITSONME!

– puzzle by Steve Savoy

This puzzle was a real challenge to construct, and I imagine it will be just as challenging to solve!

I originally came up with the idea in January after noticing that ERASERS becomes EASES after the Rs are literally erased. I wondered if there were any other words that made sense after their Rs were erased, particularly ones with multiple Rs. After that, I spent many hours trying to maximize the theme density, starting in the lower left with my favorite pair of entries, M(R) AND M(R)S. For the first time in many months, I had to use manual construction in conjunction with crossword construction software: I was able to create a word list with all the Rs filtered out to avoid adding nonthematic Rs, but I couldn't figure out a way to get the software to recognize that all entries crossing the thematic Rs had to make sense when the Rs were erased. Thus, the construction process, particularly in the upper half of the puzzle, was laborious—at multiple points, I was convinced that finishing this puzzle would be impossible. Yet somehow I managed to fill a grid that worked!

I wish I had been able to incorporate one more R in the upper right, but I just couldn't get it to work without seriously straining the fill. As a final note, I constructed the puzzle in a 72-word grid in case Will Shortz liked the theme but felt the puzzle would be more appropriate for a Saturday.

– puzzle by David Steinberg

This puzzle went through several dozen revisions on two completely different theme concepts. I started with the basic idea of making giant letters out of the letters themselves, i.e. a giant C out of Cs, I out of Is, etc. and noticed that some letters I could clue in a homophonic style (the formation of a giant C would require SEES, SEAS, and SEIZE, T would only require TEES and TEASE, and I would be easy with just EYES). Only the letters C I L T and U fit my criteria though, so what could I do with those? The word CUT came to mind. After some rumination, this led to my first submission, where each theme answer had CUT cut out of it, (CUT) ONES TEETH ON, e.g.

Well, that was terrible; a fourth-rate dirty rotten stinker. In the back of my head I knew it wasn't very good, but I sent it anyway (sorry, Will, I won't send in stinkers any more). Will politely said he didn't care for the theme and pointed out that my symmetry (up-down) was just too visually strange. Looking back on it, I see what he meant. It's important to learn the rules before you break them, and I won't be trying any more up-down symmetry puzzles (unless they're similar in nature to Kevin Der's Titanic puzzle).

Luckily, I'm too stubborn (stupid) to give up. Lying in bed one night, the phrase "a cut above the rest" came to me and I slunk out of bed. Five bleary hours later, I came up with my first skeleton, but it ultimately Titanic-ed. It had all sort of grid issues, a ton of cheater squares, and several areas I wasn't sure I could fill cleanly. So I tore it up and stuck it someplace lewd.

My tenacious idiocy caught up with me a few months later and I took another stab at it. I didn't want any individual Cs adjacent to the big C (and similarly with the big U and T). Filling around those three giant letters was tough enough without that constraint, and with it, I was lucky to get out alive after days and hundreds of possibilities.

Then there was the issue of the other themers. I was dead set against made-up sounding definitions; I wanted in-the-language phrases instead. Luckily CUT has enough different meanings that it only took a week or so to gather a good set ... except I included HAS A SIX PACK, which nagged me as "not like the others". Good thing Will balked at that and even gave a lexical reason why. Lesson learned: if it looks like poo and smells like poo, it likely is poo.

Back to brainstorming themers. I searched various thesauri, online sources, picked friends' brains, and finally came up with SNIDE REMARK. I don't think it's as strong as some of the other themers, but was glad that Will accepted it. A few more hours of rework and recluing and I broke the plane of the goal-line. I was so relieved I spiked my computer.

A final note on symmetry. Typically L-R symmetry is no harder to execute on than normal (rotational) symmetry, but I couldn't spread my themers out like usual. Needing all my vertical themers to be pushed to the bottom, I was forced to incorporate an enormous number of across answers which overlapped two themers. Filling the dang thing nearly broke me. I still cringe at TEN O and don't care for ERNES crossing ESS or CTRS or ASTR. But sometimes you have to accept a little subpar fill in order to make an idea work. Hopefully solvers found the trade-off acceptable.

– puzzle by Jeff Chen

Thousands of University of Minnesota students learning organic chemistry have read George's handout that reveals the four secrets of organic chemistry, the second of which is that "oil and water don't mix." Back in the spring of 2006, we were brainstorming in our usual ways via e-mail, IM chat, and occasional phone calls, and realized that LIKE_OIL_AND_WATER was 15 letters and could span the center of a grid. Recalling that the majority of organic liquids are less dense than water and hence form an upper phase after being shaken with water, it occurred to us to place oil-containing theme entries exclusively above the central entry, and water-containing entries exclusively below.

Early decisions were to have OIL and WATER both be rebuses (for a while we toyed with HHO or even HOH, but those ideas proved unworkable), to use left-right symmetry, and to separate the two phases by a staggered set of solid bold bars rather than full-sized blocks. Mike ran the concept by Will informally, but the project went into hibernation for several years until the summer of 2010. It was then that Mike realized that switching the positions of the words OIL and WATER in the central reveal would also allow a vertical T(oil)ET(water) entry to place rebus elements both above and below the divide.

Mike produced a few candidate grids that we worked together to polish over the next few months, and George saw how the word LAYER could be inserted near the lower bottom and could be clued to provide a final level of reveal. Will was hesitant for a long time, because he had never previously used bars in a Times weekday crossword, and he was also concerned about on-line solving. With hindsight, this delay turned out to be a positive, because so many other brilliant constructions that "push the envelope" have been published between the time our original ideas were formulated and the present day. For the two of us, this was a fun collaboration that played into our respective strengths, and we hope that solvers will like it too.

– puzzle by George Barany and Michael Shteyman

Todd:

Unlike our previous collaboration, this puzzle had a long gestation before being published. I submitted my original version in March of 2012. Will liked the basic idea, but didn't like about 9 of my original entries.

I mentioned my puzzle to David at Crosswords LA in May, and he wanted to see if he could improve on my grid. Turned out he could indeed: we submitted our revised version in June. After several back-and-forths, Will accepted our puzzle this August! We've had to wait almost 4 months for our centennial crossword to be printed ... it's hard to wait that long (ask any kid right about now)!

Finally, I'll note my original version had FUNICELLO at 16 Across, which is definitely more FUN than FUNGICIDE!

David;

It was a pleasure working with Todd on this centennial puzzle. The grid was a real challenge to fill because it not only had a themeless word count (70) but also contained four theme entries with rather unfriendly letter patterns (I'm talking about you, MCMXIII!), not to mention the FUN arrangement. Nevertheless, Todd and I were able to pool our resources and produce a fill we're both very proud of!

– puzzle by Todd Gross and David Steinberg

Andrea:

Michael and I met at a construction lunch and became good friends a half dozen years ago. Many of our puzzles are from something one or the other of us has spontaneously said at lunch and we expand it into a puzzle. Because the puzzle was based on an idea Michael originally had, he gets top billing on this one. This is our 6th published collaboration, but we've made at least a dozen more that have been published elsewhere, or for private clients, or have (gulp) been rejected.

We have very different styles and senses of humor, but share a respect for each other and usually have dozens of backs and forths about what we can and can not live with, usually managing to work it all out. We offer advice on each other's individual work as well. And it was Michael who brought me into this century by insisting I learn how to use a computer to aid my construction and to facilitate our collaborations. This puzzle went through eight or so iterations as we tried to make it as smooth as possible.

This is a traditional puzzle type (this word follows these words ...) but we were excited because we had a nice 15 reveal across the middle and four theme entries that had not been used before: SPERM WHALE, PIGGYBACKING, FOG MACHINE. Two 10s, two 12s and a 15 reveal seemed like a lot of material for a Monday, so I thought this would be a Tuesday, but I think I'm seared in Will's brain as Miss Monday. So be it!

What we liked is that there are so many kinds of banks, river banks, sperm banks, piggy banks, fog banks (a nod to SF where we both reside), so room to play! Plus we loved the cheekiness of SPERMWHALE as well as the X in RIVERPHOENIX. And yes, we went for the pangram. Originally we had JAH/JONG but it was for a Monday/Tuesday level and Michael couldn't live with JAH, but was able to change OBOE to OJOS and preserve the J!

KOKO is snuck into the lower corner as a tribute to the Siamese I had for 16 years who was my closest companion. The only other private shout out is to the COEN brothers, as they are fellow Jews from Minneapolis. When we made this puzzle a year and a half ago, "No Country for Old Men" was their big hit. I've asked Will to update the clue to their new smash "Inside Llewyn Davis", but it may be too soon, or that film title might not be Monday level.

– puzzle by Michael Blake and Andrea Carla Michaels

By the time this reaches you, I hope all who celebrate have had a Merry Christmas.

It's unusual to see theme answers arranged like the second and fourth ones in this puzzle — with a "cheater"* and not spanning the rest of the grid. However, I had to do that. I tried not having the cheaters and using the 10's and 15's in all four combinations (I didn't want the revealer in the middle; I didn't want the top and bottom 15's only one row apart from the 10's), and found that the fill went much smoother with this arrangement. (That's even with IERI, which I definitely didn't want, but had to use.)

Two things about the low word count for a themed puzzle. One, I confess that I tried to go lower than that (tried making 9D or 10D 7 letters, tried making 3D 8 letters... but not at the same time!). Two, I didn't want to clutter the top with too many blocks, considering that I had to use a lot of them in the middle to make the themers work. Once I found that 6/8 worked in the top two rows, I didn't hesitate to use it. (Plus, I'm a themeless guy at heart, as you may be able to tell.)

About the theme answers — I didn't set out to make this kind of theme (I know we've seen these themes before), but I was fortunate to have my crossword sense (like "Spidey-sense", but a lot geekier) activated when hearing this phrase that would become the revealer. I thought that finding a mixed-up seven-letter sequence in crossworthy phrases would be harder, but I still had to think a bit to get the symmetrical pairs. I lucked upon the 15s, honestly — the 10s were much easier.

*Cheater = black square which doesn't affect the total word count. Today's has four cheaters, the short ends of the four L blocks of black squares.

– puzzle by Tim Croce