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The impetus for this puzzle was a bizarre desire to make something interesting out of the terrible crosswordese abbreviation AT NOS. My original submission used that phrase as the revealer, thereby giving a raison d'être for abbreviating the chemical elements. To enhance the theme, I created a sparse, super-symmetric grid-art layout evocative of the Rutherford-Bohr model of an atom.

Unusually, this theme relies on two-letter entries. They break the fundamental crossword convention that all words should be at least three letters long. For reference, only six other NYT grids in the Shortz era have contained two-letter words.

Unfortunately, since the original grid only had 25 black blocks, the fill was relatively weak. Generally speaking, the more white space you have, the harder it is to find clean fill. Furthermore, by using such a spartan grid configuration, I was at the mercy of the crossword gods as to which elements got featured. Luckily, despite these flaws, Will Shortz and crew were still interested in the idea. They offered that if I could create a cleaner grid featuring more familiar elements, they'd take a look.

The current arrangement uses 12 cheater squares. They make filling easier and provide flexibility to manipulate which elements get featured. By changing how many black squares there are and where they are deployed, the two-letter slots can correspond to different clue numbers. For example, if the cheater square in the upper-left corner were removed, the first element would be Beryllium (BE) instead of Lithium (LI).

Using these cheater squares, however, muddles the grid art and eliminates the supersymmetry. Ultimately, however, a clean, interesting solve rightfully takes priority. I hope this puzzle provides that.

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

I'm very excited to have my first solo byline and my first themeless puzzle published! I decided to give themeless constructing a try after seeing the statistics about how few women have historically constructed Fridays and Saturdays for the NYT.

To start, I seeded this puzzle with POLAR BEAR PLUNGE because I love jumping in freezing cold alpine lakes. From there, I focused on converting as many of the long slots as possible into interesting entries and minimizing liabilities (including keeping the 3-letter-word count down.) I found that this grid offered a fair amount of flexibility since the entries in the middle diagonal (along the VEAL -> VERY axis) had several alternatives and could be swapped out pretty easily when I needed to rewrite a corner.

Since I'm still new to constructing, I wasn't surprised to see many clues changed in the editing process, but a few of my original ones (FIRST STEP, SKI SEASON, SARA, SPA, etc) made it through. SKI SEASON feels especially timely as the season is starting up right now (even though I prefer cross country skiing to going on downhill runs!)

Thank you to Robyn Weintraub and Peter Wentz for generously answering my many, many questions about how exactly one goes from a blank grid to a finished themeless puzzle. They shared useful technical tips and, most importantly, helped me keep my standards high. Thank you also to Erik and Will N for connecting to me Robyn and Peter, to Jeff and Jim for all the great resources at XWord Info, and to my mom and aunt for being my trusty test solvers!

– puzzle by Leslie Rogers

CHRISTINA: I feel I can't take much credit for this one. It was the fourth collaboration I did with Jeff, and the first Sunday grid we've done. The theme idea was Jeff's, during a really long brainstorming session over email (easily over a hundred emails). Because of all the constraints and the mirror symmetry, the grid skeleton was a real challenge to make with fewer than 143 words (3 more than the typical max). I took many stabs at it, but Jeff came up with this one.

This was one of my first times filling a Sunday grid, and it was a beast! I couldn't believe how hard it is to fill a grid like this without any duplicates. Just when we thought we had a version we liked, we'd catch another one. Verbs like "run "and "eat" pop up in so many phrases, and with different tenses, they can be hard to catch.

Jeff and I have different methods of filling a grid, and I learned a lot from his style. He is highly methodical, and holds off on decision making until looking at every possible way to fill each section. I feel very lucky to have gotten the chance to work with him.

JEFF: Christina is being modest. An idea that comes out of a deep brainstorming session belongs to both people, 50/50. I often tell budding constructors that volume is an important factor in coming up with a good crossword theme, maybe one out of 20 concepts being a decent starting point.

Note that I said "starting point," not "idea." I find that the best constructors are the ones willing to work through difficulties and put in the time to let that seed of an idea grow into something crossworthy, and Christina is a perfect example.

– puzzle by Christina Iverson and Jeff Chen

KEVIN: The original version of this had RICE KRISPIES BOX 15, NORTH POLE 9, KEEBLER AD 9, and JRR TOLKIEN BOOKS 15. Joel emailed Howard and me and said they weren't crazy about KEEBLER AD 9 or JRR TOLKIEN BOOKS 15. Howard and I asked if we could send a revision with LORD OF THE RINGS 14, RICE KRISPIES BOX 15, and SANTA'S WORKSHOP 14. Joel said sure they would take a look and we went from there.

Early on I fretted over whether the Rice Krispies characters are elves or gnomes. If they're gnomes, then are elves a subset of gnomes, are gnomes a subset of elves, are gnomes and elves exactly the same things, or are they totally different things? In the end I decided that the characters on the Rice Krispies box are elves, not gnomes, so it didn't matter. Crisis averted. Whew!

In the long down fill, HEAD DESK was a phrase I'd been wanting to work into a puzzle for a while. FREE WIFI is a part of everyday life, and it's never been in an NYT crossword puzzle before. There are lots of interesting ways to clue ROCK STAR, so that's a good one. We would have rather had EXCUSE ME in the spot that has ENVISAGE, but the rest of the fill in that area was cleaner with ENVISAGE, so we went with that.

HOWARD: I don't have much more to add to Kevin's comments here, except this was a fun, accessible little theme to craft with him. Also, my intensive searches about rice-based cereal mascots turned up enough evidence of elf-esteem to satisfy my doubts about its inclusion in the puzzle, and I'm glad that Kevin was also okay with it :-). Enjoy!

– puzzle by Howard Barkin and Kevin Christian

My first thought of making crossword puzzles started after I learned Will Shortz's story while looking through an alumni magazine in 2005, how he got his law degree then went on to become the editor of crosswords at the Times. Years later, there was a piece about Sam Ezersky, who graduated as an engineer then went to work with Will. It was this second nudge about another fellow alum that finally pushed me to add constructing crossword puzzles to my list of activities to pursue through old-age, along with photography and duplicate bridge. Playing the piano would also have made the list if I had had any hope of mastering it.

My first thought was to make the themeless puzzles I got so good at solving while commuting to the city in the early '90s. It was a pleasant surprise to realize that what elevates many of today's crossword puzzles is computing power combined with an author's creativity.

It's taken two years of fine-tuning, and still, every time an idea for a theme strikes, the hours pass like minutes while I am working on a new grid.

Thanks to the UVA Alumni Magazine for providing the inspiration to begin. Concerning A Reduced Sentence's theme, from the writing of Thomas Jefferson, "the most valuable of all talents, that of never using two words where one will do."

– puzzle by Margaret Saine

It's particularly fun to debut on the Sunday before Christmas since my crossword creation habit began exactly a year ago when I decided to make a year-in-review crossword for our annual family letter!

In the process of figuring out how to construct that first puzzle, I was thrilled to discover the plentiful online resources for aspiring constructors. I was amazed by the enthusiastic encouragement of beginners from experienced constructors and in Wordplay's How to Make a Crossword Puzzle. Together, the resources and encouragement got me thinking that maybe I could make a publishable crossword. Later, the specific, gently-delivered feedback from Times editors on three rejected submissions helped me know what to focus on improving. (Imagine if educators were to trade the "weeding out" mentality for an "encourage and provide targeted feedback" approach . . . )

This puzzle evolved from the idea of doing something numerical with 39-Across. The happy discovery that its central letter was also the start of 41-Down inspired me to learn the tiny bit of RegEx (thanks, Jim, Jeff, and XWord Info!) needed to find other pairs. Then came the revelation that the words which ended up in the central column could fit there so nicely, and the idea for the block design followed. I had begun working on the fill when one of Jeff's XWord Info notes sparked the idea of leaving out T's. The title came after I'd finished everything else.

About half my clues or lightly edited versions thereof remain. Of these, about a quarter are interesting/original. I like how the editors re-clued 114-Across, 22-Down, and 41-Down for the season! The only clue I was sad to lose, particularly given the timing of the puzzle's appearance, was "Nativity scene?" for 60-Down.

Thanks to my known test solvers, cousin Don and spouse Geoff, and to all — known and unknown — who have helped bring this to fruition!

– puzzle by Laura Taylor Kinnel

Sometimes the stars align around publication dates. Even though it's been close to two years since this puzzle was accepted, the timing is spot on. I currently have STIEG Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy on loan from the library. I'll be starting on "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" as soon as I finish Robin Hobb's "The Golden Fool." I'm reading my way through her oeuvre, and I need a break since her next book, "Fool's Fate" isn't available through my local library (and it will take some time for an inter-library loan request to come through). I enjoy her "The Realm of the Elderlings" stories — they're in a similar vein as George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series and Brandon Sanderson's "Mistborn" series, both of which I highly recommend if you like epic fantasy.

That said, looking back on this puzzle now, the crossing of STIEG and EGON may be difficult for some solvers. Since both names are unusual, it could be difficult to infer the G if you aren't familiar with either one.

Likewise, another crossing that I'd rework if I were remaking the puzzle today is AREOLAR and EPOCHAL. Neither word is great on its own, and crossing two similarly awkward words makes each stand out all the more. That crossing, however, is much fairer to the solver since the base words are well known. The problem there lies more in elegance than potential Natick creation.

The inspiration for this puzzle was the Disneyland version of the Dapper Dans, a barbershop quartet who perform along Main Street, U.S.A. Along with the ragtime piano player at Refreshment Corner (shout-out to Patrick, who's the best of the bunch!), the Dapper Dans are my favorite atmospheric entertainment in the park.

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

The theme of this puzzle bears more than a passing resemblance to that of my Battleship puzzle from approximately two years ago, although the relative elegance of this one does make me wonder a bit why I didn't come up with it first. I liked that SPARE, STRIKE, and TURKEY are each the first word of their respective theme answers and that I was able to put them in what feels like the most logical order. I do think it's interesting that both puzzles even involve X's standing in for parts of theme entries, although this one also includes a slash mark to mix things up.

In constructing the grid, I focused first on the region around the three X's, and when I noticed the possibility of threading ORTHODOX JEW through two theme entries, I pretty much vowed to make it work. I had to REJIGGER (and re-rejigger) the arrangement of black squares, but ultimately, I think that section turned out quite nicely, and the rest of the puzzle looks pretty good as well. I tried to work in some nice bonus fill, including RIVER SEINE, ROLEPLAY, and the BATCAVE / SPELUNK pairing, without making too many compromises — hopefully, I managed to STRIKE THE RIGHT BALANCE.

The majority of my clues made in into the final version of the puzzle. Some of my favorites of mine are those for 4-Across, 32-Across, 5-Down, 31-Down, and 59-Down. I also am glad to see that the clue [Prefix with –phyte] for both NEO and XERO survived the edit, and I think that [Letter in the NATO alphabet] for X-RAY is a nice callback to yet another one of my previous puzzles for the Times.

I hope you found this to be an enjoyable solve, and that the theme was… up your alley (I'll show myself out).

– puzzle by Trenton Charlson