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PATTI: I've been waiting a long time for a New York Times byline, and I love that it's on a collaboration with Doug — even though this is our first NYT together, it is the ninth themeless we've co-constructed. Subscribers to Crosswords Club, which I edit, may know our joint puzzles appear under the name "Helena Buchanan," a pen name that hints at one home state and one favorite novel.

I'm sad our clue to 1A didn't survive, which was [One who has no brand loyalty?]. And I'd clued 37A to reference an actress on The Magicians, which is my favorite train wreck of a TV show. That ... was probably a good clue change.

DOUG: It's always a pleasure to work with Patti on a puzzle! She loves the part I don't love (writing the clues), so we make a great tag team. We're like the original Hart Foundation, but with 95% fewer suplexes.

Patti and I are both baseball fans, so we referenced the infamous PINE TAR Game in our original clue for 38D. I love the image of George Brett barrelling out of the dugout with steam almost literally coming out of his ears.

– puzzle by Patti Varol and Doug Peterson

I had made a puzzle years ago where the theme consisted of phrases in the form of "___ OF ___," but with the first and last words swapped: one was PARIS OF PLASTER. I remembered that theme recently and noticed that removing the connecting "OF" in some of the base phrases made for a whole new range of meaning changes.

As you can imagine, this is quite a fungible theme — I'm pretty sure there are about a million "___ OF ___" phrases — so, in an effort to winnow down the pile, at first I tried to make them all have some other thing in common, and I wound up with a group of phrases related to woodworking. A few examples were BOARDEDUCATION and TABLECONTENTS. I submitted that puzzle first but a few of the theme entries did not feel quite right to Will — however, the overall idea was acceptable enough to merit a rework, so the published puzzle was actually the second crack at it, and FRAMEREFERENCE was the lone holdover from the woodworking version.

One thing I enjoyed in particular about this version was, the longest entry was one that wouldn't have worked the same way before the age of Netflix and the like. It's always nice to have an opportunity to use a relatively new sense of a word, and sometimes that can be the thing that makes an old theme finally come together. The moral is, don't throw out those partial theme ideas!

Thanks again to Will, Sam, and the rest of the gang for all their input.

– puzzle by Tony Orbach

I'm excited to be making my debut at the New York Times with this puzzle, which I hope you find FRESH, not STALE! The theme was inspired by all the fun crosswords that have used the idea of "grid as object," whether they involve grid art, answers bursting out from the edge of the puzzle, etc. The notion of polarity first came to mind, then the revealer POLAR OPPOSITE, and finally a theme of "grid as world" with pairs of antonyms sitting on the border in rotationally symmetrical slots.

There were a bunch of equal-length antonym pairs to choose from after digging around online, so my goal was to whittle them down to pairs that felt resonant, fit comfortably around the grid's border, and covered a variety of lengths. I was happy to end up with pairs of length 3, 4, 5 and 6 in the final product. Looking back at the layout, there are definitely opportunities for a more open grid, but overall I'm not mad at this early construction effort.

If you'd like to see more puzzles from me, I offer free monthly crosswords with an indie vibe on my site, datalexic.com.

– puzzle by Enrique Henestroza Anguiano

OWEN: It's crazy to me that last Friday marks one year since I cold emailed Jeff to see if he would be interested in co-constructing. As a long-time solver, I had tried my hand at making puzzles only a couple of times before, mostly for fun. Collaborating with an experienced constructor was a great way to learn, and I'm so grateful to Jeff for helping me think through my many theme ideas. He and I worked on a couple of puzzles together, eventually getting this one accepted last summer. As a first-year engineering student in the middle of finals week, I'm thrilled and honored to be making my debut today.

This theme came to me while I was living in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and it went through several iterations before becoming the set you see today. We initially considered DO THE LIMBO as a revealer, but going with LIMBO allowed us to open up the grid a bit more. It was fun to go down to 72 words and include so many long bonuses like 9D, 24D, and 31D. I'm happy to see that some of my clues made the final cut, especially the ones for 22D and 39A. I'm also very grateful to the editorial staff for their many edits and improvements.

Thanks so much to Jeff for his insight and expertise, and to everyone who encouraged me with this endeavor. Hope you enjoy!

– puzzle by Owen Travis and Jeff Chen

My New York Times debut was only about a month ago, and it's great to be back so soon! Thursday is my favorite crossword day. I love tricky themes and tough clues. I hope today's puzzle wasn't too… elementary.

I originally submitted this puzzle with the following theme set:

[Cape] = CARBON COPY
[Aground] = SILVER BULLET
[Female] = IRON MAN
[Oration] = OXYGEN SUPPLY
[Curing] = COPPERTONE

but the editing team pointed out that ring = tone was not a very precise association and asked if I had any replacements. It took a fair amount of back and forth to land on the final set, and I'm grateful for Will and Sam's patience through that process.

Swapping in SILICON CHIP and CARBON DATED required remaking the entire grid, but I think it turned out better than the original. I got an unofficial thumbs up from Will on the revised grid (pending clues) the morning after my wedding, 9/2/19. It was my first NYT acceptance and one of the best wedding gifts I received. On our honeymoon in Aruba, my wife read books like a normal sunbather while I brought my laptop to the beach to write clues.

– puzzle by Jack Murtagh

With apologies to J.K. Rowling, I've been asked to say a few words, and here they are: ALAI IPSE RARA MALESKA.

This bizarre incantation is not, as far as I know, how modern speed solvers fire themselves up for crossword tournaments, but 40 years ago it might have passed for a daily New York Times cheat code. I've never watched a jai alai match, nor I could use the Latin phrases ipse dixit and rara avis in a sentence other than this one. But I still know the name Eugene T. Maleska, the former crossword editor, and if nothing else, he taught me how to fill in the blanks with otherwise-alien letter combinations. Fortunately I didn't have to resort to any of those for this puzzle.

Just a few more words: KROZEL WEINTRAUB BURNIKEL REID NOTHNAGEL. You all make terrific puzzles — thanks for letting me sneak one in!

– puzzle by Ari Richter

For our second Times collaboration, we sought a themeless grid with a novel architecture. Sid had the idea of a marquee central stack with each subsequent Across entry flush against the left or right side of the grid in an alternating fashion. It turned out that this constraint required an even number of rows, so we pushed to a 16-tall grid with six central Acrosses. The center forced wide-open corners in the top left and bottom right. We're proud of it!

We've had the great fortune to construct for many venues both together and solo! Notably, we've been known to collaborate on Sid's puzzle blog. Some other recent highlights: Sid has written puzzles for three crossword tournaments this year, including the Championship Puzzle for the Boswords 2020 Fall Themeless League … and Brooke is excited to be joining the Boswords team for their Spring 2021 Themeless League — find both the Fall 2020 puzzle packet and Spring 2021 info at boswords.org! Today's puzzle rounds out an exciting week for Brooke, which included her 22nd puzzle in the USA Today and her first puzzle with the Inkubator (puzzles by trans women, cis women, and women-aligned constructors). She also has her own puzzle blog (note from Sid: Brooke's experimentations with grid symmetry have changed the indie crossword scene, and ripple effects are starting to be seen in mainstream puzzles, too).

A closing message from Brooke: It was a little less than a year ago that I decided a goal for 2020 would be to construct (let alone submit!) a single crossword puzzle. If you're interested in constructing but are on the fence, I encourage you to go for it! You can get involved with the community through the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory or the Crossword Discord Server.

– puzzle by Sid Sivakumar and Brooke Husic

Thrilled to be making my Sunday debut in the NY Times! I've had a few weekday submissions accepted, but my "Holy Grail" has always been the Sunday Magazine puzzle.

I've been solving puzzles most of my adult life, and in fact, many of my extended family are major puzzlers — crossword, Spelling Bee, Ken Ken, Two not Touch — and we're always texting back and forth about these. Special thanks to my sister Jane and brother Seth, for being my "test drivers" on all my crosswords!

My true passion is music, and I play in a "dad" band called Landing Party (which, for obvious reasons, is on hiatus right now). Speaking of music, the idea for this puzzle came to me based on my first puzzle accepted in 2014, which was a play on song titles (Clue: rap song. Answer: knock on wood). I started wondering if the same trick could be applied to movies and voila.

Many thanks to Will and Joel, who were so helpful in making this a much better puzzle from its original iteration (Will came up with the PG Movie clue, which was perfect as a last themer).

– puzzle by Dan Margolis

JESSIE Today's puzzle is an ode to female scholars, and I'm very excited that it's my debut grid in the Times. I'm a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard's Department of Government, and I generally strive to have my puzzles' content reflect academia and my areas of research: crime and corruption in Latin America. (Check out my puzzle in tomorrow's Universal Crossword for one such example.)

We originally clued this puzzle as a mid-week offering, so a few of our clues got nixed in favor of more straightforward fare. Some favorites:

• ["I just took a ___ test" (Lizzo lyric)] for DNA
• [Rocks with a punch?] for ICE
• [Book on invasive plants?] for SPY NOVEL

Many thanks to the Times editors for their feedback and support, as well as to Ross for sharing the joy of crossword construction with me. We've been hunkered down together all year with our bad cat Ruby, and wacky theme brainstorming — even beyond the thematic realm of political corruption — has become one of my favorite quarantine pastimes.

ROSS: I love Jessie more than cake. Today is a happy day. For more Jessie-Ross crosswords, visit my personal puzzle site.

– puzzle by Jessie Bullock and Ross Trudeau

I'm so excited to make my debut in The New York Times! I started seriously constructing in August 2018 and racked up seventeen rejections before finally receiving the fabled "Crossword — yes!" email in March earlier this year.

56-Across was my seed entry for this puzzle. It probably won't surprise anyone to hear that my original clue referenced New York, nor that the editorial team changed it to Los Angeles. Brainstorming other themers turned out to be an exercise in realizing the limits of my perspective, which is a cool but also frustrating part of constructing. For example, a paper I grew up assuming was widely read turned out to be just a county newspaper (meaning ON THE RECORD wouldn't fly), and I learned that LOST IN THE POST, the title of a song I've listened to since middle school, isn't actually a British idiom. In the end, I could only make three entries work, which I was worried would be too sparse for a theme, but thankfully it wasn't a dealbreaker.

I'm grateful to the editorial team for helping polish this puzzle (and also all their thoughtful feedback on my 17 earlier submissions), but I'm glad a couple clues I wrote made the cut. Most notably, as someone who played a lot of Monopoly growing up, I couldn't pass up the intersecting references at 68-Across and 49-Down. I hope you enjoyed the puzzle!

– puzzle by Adam Vincent

It's surprisingly difficult to assemble a usable set of well-known government agencies that don't repeat Agency, Commission, Department, Federal, National, Security, Service, or Trade. We discovered this over ice cream in fall 2018, which now feels like a lifetime ago. Since this puzzle was accepted, the ice cream store where we did our brainstorming closed, the president was impeached, and a pandemic has gripped the planet.

A queue time of more than two years seems long (especially for a debut!). Perhaps Will has an overabundance of Wednesdays and/or hidden-word themes. As of August 2019, Wednesday was Will's third-longest queue with 41 puzzles awaiting publication.

Our must-haves were NSA and AIRCRAFT CARRIER. Ed retired from a career as a U. S. Navy Cryptologic Officer in ceremonies aboard the frigate Constellation in Baltimore's Inner Harbor while stationed at the NSA. Prior to that, among other posts, he served aboard the aircraft carrier Constellation during the Vietnam War.

Our starting point was trying to incorporate NSA into a crossword theme. The idea of hiding government agencies in theme entries actually preceded the revealer GOVERNMENT BONDS. But once we found that, we were off to the races!

ALEX: I'm jealous of Ed's 100% acceptance rate at the NYT (he's one-for-one). It took me 16 rejections before I got my first acceptance!

ED: I'd like to claim some credit for Alex's love of puzzles. We played many word games on the way to school, and I was his math and English teacher for two years.

– puzzle by Ed Salners and Alex Eaton-Salners

I'm thrilled to make my NY Times debut with a puzzle dedicated to one of my favorite composers. I play piccolo and flute in the Houston Symphony and Beethoven's music is always a joy to perform. (When I'm not performing I can often be found backstage hunched over a crossword with a few colleagues). Beethoven's Fifth is extra special to me because it was the first symphony to feature the piccolo! If you've only heard the first movement I encourage you to listen to the whole thing — it's a true masterpiece. The opening four notes are said to represent fate "knocking at the door" and the entire symphony plays out as an epic struggle between darkness and light.

I grew up doing crossword puzzles with my dad, a devoted daily solver despite being a terrible speller. We still do puzzles together and now he is the beta-tester for my creations (additional thanks to my mom, sister, Matthew and Ian!) I started constructing puzzles about 2 years ago after doing a lot of diagramless crosswords. Those got me interested in the structure and symmetry of crosswords and led me to try creating my own.

The hardest part for me is coming up with a clever theme, so I was excited when I got the idea to embed the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth in a puzzle. I wanted the placement of the "notes" to make sense musically as well. If you draw a line through the rows starting at 20-, 28-, 36-, 44- and 55-across, you'll create a 5-line musical staff with the notes falling on the correct line (in treble clef) - transforming the puzzle into a piece of sheet music.

It was a delight to be edited by Will Shortz, who took this puzzle's clues to the next level. I can't take credit for most of the really good ones, especially 58-across which cracked me up!

Happy 250th Ludwig!

– puzzle by Kathryn Ladner

ANDREW: I first worked with Caitlin when I commissioned a puzzle from her for Aries Freestyle, which is a themeless puzzle-by-email subscription service that I run. I quickly found that we share much of the same constructing philosophy when it comes to themelesses - prioritizing clean grids with difficulty emerging primarily from tricky, misdirecting clues. So I couldn't wait to co-construct with Caitlin, and this puzzle is the first of our collaborative themeless efforts.

Most of this grid is Caitlin's, whose stellar ABOUT THE AUTHOR clue/entry pairing was the killer seed. I was able to open up the center with an ELIZABETH entry in the central down slot — I originally had TAYLOR and Caitlin found a good fill with the more-current WARREN. It was a great pleasure working with Caitlin and hope that solvers will see more from this byline in the future!

CAITLIN: An admirer of Andrew's puzzles (especially his themelesses), I jumped at the chance to make one with him! Collaborating with him is easy as we do indeed share a similar style. We went back and forth on this one with gridding and then split the clues for the most part. I particularly liked his clever ones for 13- and 28-Down. Always glad to collaborate with Andrew, and I'm excited to finally get a Saturday under my belt!

– puzzle by Caitlin Reid and Andrew J. Ries

This puzzle was inspired by a FaceTime conversation earlier this year with my son and grandsons, Henry and Oren, who I hardly have seen in person very much since this pandemic began. I had sent Henry a Rubik's Cube and Oren a Tickle Me Elmo. In the course of the call, I dropped the factoids about these toys I included in the puzzle. This led my son and me to talk about other toys and games that he played with as a kid, and we Googled some trivia about them.

It occurred to me that for this Christmas and Hanukkah, with so many grandparents and other friends and family not able to see the little children in their lives in person, that a crossword about toys might bring a smile. I typically employ wordplay themes in my Sunday puzzles, but for this December, I thought a puzzle about toys might be appropriate for a holiday so nostalgic and so focused on children.

So I dedicate this crossword to my grandchildren and everyone else who would like to be with kids this holiday time.

Happy and safe holidays to all.

– puzzle by Randolph Ross

SARAH: I have always enjoyed co-creating crosswords with Derek. (Never a cross word)

Emailing facilitates the task of back-and-forth discussions to reach agreements as to theme entries, grid design, fill, and ultimately clues. This work went through many changes in all those areas.

We initially had several words from which to choose the needed five synonymous theme entries. With BLATHER, PRATTLE, and TWADDLE all being 7 letter words, we were given the flexibility to select the one we needed to fill the NE corner. We sure needed that flexibility to find the best overall fill. The other two were ultimately used as theme clues.

Once it was decided to choose other synonyms and descriptive phrases for each of the theme entry clues, little did we know that we had created more work for ourselves. It required a great deal more site-searching until we found them. In the end, the editorial staff did some tweaking to enhance the outcome. In addition to our theme work, it took more grid work to find entries to meet the New York Times criteria.

It was a long, but well-spent, time as we hoped for and we finally received our final acceptance.

DEREK: It's been a pleasure working with Sarah over the years. As a collaborative team, we now have 3 New York Times puzzles, 3 Simon & Schuster puzzles, 1 LA Times puzzle, 1 Wall Street Journal puzzle, and 1 puzzle-oriented shoebox diorama (complete with construction paper and wagon-wheel pasta noodles). What a long, strange trip it's been!

Sarah is definitely a theme maven. If you look up "Themes" under the Wikipedia page for "Crossword," you'll see one of hers as an example. She came to me with the theme for this puzzle at the 2019 ACPT, and we spent the next 9 months hashing it out, with plenty of guidance from the great New York Times editorial team. Hope everyone enjoys it.

– puzzle by Sarah Keller and Derek Bowman

I always enjoyed crosswords, but I really got into solving when I became a parent. Puzzles are easy to pick up and put down between the constant interruptions (and intermittent joys) of childcare. When my youngest was two, I decided to take a crack at constructing.

I probably should have found a mentor and researched crossword venues, but why do things the easy way? Instead, I just sent every puzzle I made to Will Shortz. As the rejection emails rolled in, the detailed feedback from NYT editors helped me understand what I was doing wrong and, occasionally, right.

Eventually, I researched other venues and discovered the daring, dynamic "yes" culture of indie publishers. Ben Tausig at AVCX said yes to my debut puzzle and offered brilliant guidance at every stage of development. Tracy Bennett and Laura Braunstein said yes when I asked to join the Inkubator team. Evan Birnholz encouraged me to apply to Vox.com, and they said yes too — I now publish a crossword there every Tuesday.

This is all just to say thanks to those who've offered their knowledge and support since I took that first shot in the dark three years ago. It's led to so many good things, including this "yes" from the New York Times.

I happened upon the term WEATHER BALLOONS as I was searching for entries for another theme set. It captured my imagination, and I started to think of how to put balloons in a crossword. I like that there's a visual pun in this puzzle — the circle rebuses could be little balloons floating across the grid.

I wrote many tricky clues for this puzzle, and several weren't quite right for a Wednesday. My favorites are:

• "Proust passages?" : RUES
• "One who sees the world through rosé colored glasses" : WINO

I am delighted that a fair amount of my clues did make it in, particularly the one for EGOT. I also appreciate the NYT editors' clever cluing of OBI and SLICED BREAD.

More to come, I hope!

– puzzle by Juliana Tringali Golden

I'm thrilled to make my constructing debut in the New York Times! I'm a corporate attorney in Frisco, Texas (about twenty minutes north of Dallas), and I've been building crosswords for just about three years now. I originally submitted this puzzle in November 2019 and, after a few rewrites and some additional minor tweaks, I got the thumbs-up in May. I'm grateful for the helpful feedback I've received from Will, Sam, Joel, Wyna, Tracy, and Andy along the way — even their rejections are always pleasant. I could not have built the grid without Matt Ginsberg's clue database and Keiran King's crossword maker, so thank you to both.

Feel free to email me (billy.ouska at gmail dot com) any comments or critiques you may have. If there are any aspiring constructors out there who have questions about the process or are looking for a resource, please get in touch. I certainly don't know as much as some veterans, but I'm always interested in working with other new constructors and getting better together.

– puzzle by Billy Ouska

WENDY: Everything that Crossworld says about Erik being generous, kind, patient, and brilliant is all true. I would also say that the standards he sets for himself are an inspiration. What I learned from Erik while working on this themeless — how to use Crossfire properly (!), that pluralizing uncommon names isn't a great idea, using words with "un" or "re" as prefixes can drag down a puzzle, and only the most common abbreviations are acceptable.

The first seed entry that came to mind was GRETA THUNBERG — because, well, she's Greta Thunberg! For me, that is the highlight of the puzzle.

This is my first New York Times crossword. Without my great friend, the brilliant Martha Jones, with whom I've written several puzzles, I would not have taken the plunge into constructing. Patrick Merrell, an amazing constructor, spent time teaching Martha and me the basics of construction. Laura Braunstein, Tracy Bennett, Rebecca Falcon, David Steinberg, Patti Varol, and Robyn Weintraub also helped, supported, taught, and encouraged me. And, of course, Erik is hands down, the best in the business with a heart to match.

ERIK: Honored to be involved with Wendy's NYT debut, and looking forward to many more from her. I will steal "generous, kind, patient, and brilliant" because they're all perfect adjectives to describe her. You can show her some love on Twitter at @WendyBrandes1.

– puzzle by Erik Agard and Wendy L. Brandes