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Dick:

If the byline for co-constructors was set in type reflecting the respective contributions of each, my name would be in eight point pica type and Jeff's in 20 point, BOLDED and italicized. I am, at age 74, very different from most who construct puzzles accepted by the New York Times. I do not attempt any crosswords or other puzzles except the Sunday NYT and it takes me close to an entire day to get near finishing one. It has been a dream to see my name attached to a Sunday NYT crossword puzzle. (I think it is the same syndrome that causes me to enjoy writing poetry but not reading it.)

I had many theme ideas (none architectural) and no ability whatsoever to take the next step. One Sunday, in checking my many unfilled answers at Rex Parker's blog, I saw a comment from Jeff volunteering to work with newbies. My initial effort ultimately led to the co-construction of a puzzle containing homophones as the theme answers, submitted to, and accepted by Will for a Wednesday publication, but it has not yet been published.

During the course of working with that puzzle, Jeff taught me the most basic of NYT crossword construction requirements, to wit: that theme answers need to be internally very consistent and "tight" (a comment I have heard from Jeff as he has, with considerable grace, declined to co-author virtually every other idea I have submitted to him!), and that the fill must be neat and clean and interesting with as little reliance on "crosswordese" as possible.

My original idea and theme word selections for this puzzle centered on well known expressions first introduced into the English language by Shakespeare. Not "tight enough" opined my new mentor. He suggested we try for such theme content from one play only. He also authored the idea of using Macbeth and working in, as the reveal clue, the reference to the superstition against mentioning the play's name, (which was the subject of a marvelous Canadian TV series called Slings and Arrows, season 2, also shown in the U.S. on Sundance). In our division of labor, we collaborated and contributed equally on the selection of the Macbeth quotes, Jeff did the grid and virtually all of the fill, and I took the lead in, and supplied much of the clues.

– puzzle by Dick Shlakman and Jeff Chen

This puzzle is one of my first constructions and the second that Will accepted. It's the last of what I would call my "Delaware Puzzles" (I moved to Vermont from Delaware in 2012). I only vaguely remember it, since it was constructed and revised almost two years ago. Like my first puzzle, it was painstakingly put together using an old dictionary over lunch breaks at work, without the benefit of Google or other basic Internet conveniences. I did have construction software at this point, but I was still quite a novice.

This one went through a major revision at Will's request, and it's been edited a bit more since then. Many of the answers in the N/NW have been changed, the biggest being LEAD SHOT where I had BIRD SHOT, and SPREE where I had FED EX. The east is also totally different (my AGLETS/BEARER/ERRORS became IGNITE/MEANER/PRIORS). I always find these editing changes fascinating.

I'm glad to have this one published, but I'm also glad that it's behind me now, as I can clearly see its weaknesses! I think I've become a better constructor in the last couple of years and I'm looking forward to turning out much better puzzles in the future. Thanks for solving!

– puzzle by Sean Dobbin

Wow — I constructed this puzzle a really long time ago! I don't remember when I started working on it, though I know I submitted the first version to Will just a few weeks after I turned 15. My original puzzle included Season 13 "Dancing With the Stars" winner J.R. MARTINEZ, which Will felt was a little too obscure. So I took my idea back to the drawing board and came up with J.R.R. TOLKIEN, which Will noted was inconsistent, since the name has three initials. Finally, after a lot of digging, I found the last 10-letter entry I would need to rebuild the puzzle: J.B. FLETCHER. Will liked that including J.B. FLETCHER would give the puzzle a more even balance of real and fictional people, so I set to work on producing the final fill.

Filling around eight theme entries containing a J, some of which were stacked, was very challenging. I was and still am pretty happy with how the puzzle turned out, though I'd probably try to use a bit less crosswordese nowadays. I particularly like how crazy the upper left looks with all the O's. I hope you enjoy solving my puzzle, JCTS and all!

– puzzle by David Steinberg

The inspiration for this puzzle came two years ago while I was eating my breakfast cereal. My original concept was to find phrases that contained the letters W, H, E, A, T with separation between these letters as though they were "shredded" or "torn apart." The individual WHEAT letters would then be circled to identify them. I ran the idea past my mentor, Nancy Salomon, who liked the Shredded Wheat theme revealer but was not a fan of the circled letters. She felt that I was being too literal minded and suggested that I find phrases that included contiguous, scrambled WHEAT letters that also spanned two words. I initially balked at her idea as I did not feel that this format justified the use of the word "shredded" in the theme revealer, but after a few days I decided to take her advice. By putting in every scrambled variation of *WHEAT* in the databases, I was able to come up with a lot of great phrases. I originally had OFF THE WALL but replaced it with GREAT WHITE so as not to have the repeated use of the word "the" with the entry THE WALTONS.

With the publishing of this puzzle, my sixth with the NYT, I wanted to take this opportunity to give a big shout out of thanks to my mentor, Nancy Salomon. Like so many other constructors before me, I have truly appreciated her expert guidance and knowledge, her unselfish generosity with her time, and her enduring patience in responding to my many questions and crazy ideas over the past few years. Thank you again, Nancy!

– puzzle by Tracy Gray

These are my first notes, so by way of introduction: my wife Carla and I live cozily on a small cove in midcoast Maine, and, having lived in far too many places before this, we're not going anywhere.

Confession: I got the idea for this puzzle from Paula Gamache's puzzle of 1/9/2009 — one of my favorites ever in the Times. Inspired by her bottom stack of three rhyming "couplets" (CULTURE VULTURES, GEORGIE PORGIE, GREEN SCREEN), I decided to go for a series of triplets, which worked fine for 12-, 14-, and 34-Across, but that's where it stopped. I would've loved to have used TRIPLE BOGEY(ED) to extend the threeness, but couldn't work it, so had to settle for just two over par. One minor concern I had: once solvers saw a kind of subtheme with repeating words, would these three answers all become GIMMEs? Maybe.

BEGS THE QUESTION has been used twice before (drat the luck!) but I still wanted it because of its widespread misuse. Digging into it, I never came across "petitio principii," so thanks to Will for cluing it this way and making 57-Across a real monster to solve (without cheating).

Like some of the puzzles Will has accepted, this one went through some revisions. My first submission split 34-Across into two entries with a block in the middle, the entries weren't so interesting, and though he liked the top and bottom stacks the puzzle was at risk because of some ho-hum fill. I repaired the grid by removing the center block, found USA USA USA to be a perfect fit, which also created an opportunity for HO GAUGE at 25-Down, really my favorite entry here. It's the only time I've removed a block to improve the fill.

This is (at last) my 10th Times puzzle, and I've seen my construction style shifting away from attempts at virtuosity toward having more fun.

– puzzle by Ned White

DOUG: This is the first time, in the NY Times puzzle, that the entry DOGSIT (39-Across) has been clued as "dog-sit" (take care of a pet) instead of "dogs it" (loafs on the job). We went that route because the entry crosses ITS at 42-Down. And Brad came up with some stellar clues for dog-sit, including the one that Will used in puzzle. Here's a nice one from the cutting room floor: [Keep an afghan around you, perhaps]. I have cats, so I don't have to worry about finding a sitter. Cats are easy. If I'm going to be gone for a couple of days, I just leave a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and they're good.

BRAD: Every time I do a puzzle with stacks of 11s, I say it will be my last for a good while. But ever since Doug and I did our puzzle of last August 3, we've had orphaned stacks that we couldn't quite mesh with the grid of the moment but that we felt had the kind of panache solvers like to see — maybe enough to launch a new puzzle. Each new grid has left us with a tempting discarded scrap. I've joked to Doug that we will have an endless loop of 11-heavy puzzles and we'll just try to space them out judiciously and use other grid types in-between. I thought this one turned out especially clean. I liked Doug's clues for 34A and 57A. And the nice SE he did led to some fun digging on my part — research-based clues that Will liked and used in the final edit.

– puzzle by Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber

Listening to the Beatles' classic "Sgt. Pepper" album a few months back, I heard them sing, "It was 20 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play". This led me in short order to discover that the Beatles made their much-touted U.S. TV debut (spoiler alert!) on the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday, February 9, 1964. Once I noticed that February 9 is also a Sunday in 2014 — which would be 50 years later to the day — I was launched on the puzzle.

I realized that the theme would become apparent to solvers of all generations, and wanting to make the puzzle something special beyond including an ample supply of phrases and songs relating to the Beatles, I came up with the idea of incorporating the names of the Beatles into the shape of a guitar. This took a few iterations, as the combination of their four names required 47 letters to produce the shape (rendered in gray squares in the print puzzle), and a bit of organization to get the surrounding black squares properly placed. Since some musicians could speculate as to whether this shape resembles an instrument that all but Ringo might actually have played, I decided to include the word "guitar" at 102 Down. I very much appreciate how Will streamlined the fill in a couple of corners. Trust this puzzle is fun — and that solvers "can work it out" without too much "help".

– puzzle by Charles M. Deber

MATTHEW: Inspiration for this puzzle came while engaging in one of my favorite activities: list-making. Actually, the list aspect came later...

I originally tried to make this puzzle solo, but only got so far as the theme answers and a grid that remained mostly unfilled. Some months later, I saw an open invitation from Jeff on one of the crossword blogs to anyone interested in collaborating or just passing an idea by him and getting feedback. So I dusted off my idea, shared it with him, and so began our collaboration.

The first order of business was improving the theme answers. My biggest takeaway from this entire experience is the importance of having a tight, consistent theme, and there was room for improvement in what I had produced. We came up with a modified set of four theme answers (IT DIDN'T WASH, CAME UP DRY, WENT TO PRESS, IN THE FOLD), but still needed a good revealer. We brainstormed some ideas, such as LAUNDRY DAY and LAUNDRY SERVICE, but none of these worked; they were either too obscure or they had been done before. And then Jeff came up with the perfect revealer: LAUNDRY LIST. I really liked this as it tied everything together visually. The theme answers sort of resemble a list. With our improved theme, we proceeded with the grid and the fill, secure in the knowledge we'd knocked it out of the park. Not quite...

The feedback on the original submission was that the first theme answer, IT DIDN'T WASH, wasn't a familiar enough phrase. (In other words, it didn't wash.) Thus, the puzzle was rejected. Jeff suggested I propose an alternative answer that he devised, and as luck would have it, there was renewed interest in the puzzle. After some additional revisions based on Will's request to further tighten theme answer consistency, and an entire reconstruction of the puzzle...success!

Thank you for solving — and reading about — our puzzle!

– puzzle by Matthew E. Paronto and Jeff Chen

This puzzle's history stretches back over two years, and it started with the grid design. I hope everybody noticed the three block T's in the grid. My original version had four themed entries consisting of three-word phrases, all of the form T* TO T* (TURNED TO TROUBLE, TRUE TO TYPE, TOOK TO TASK, and TOE TO TOE. As it turned out, I was taken to task for the last one — Will didn't like the repeated TOE. So TOE TO TOE gave way to TEN TO TWO. That also was, apparently, tough to take. After a major reworking, we settled on the current three phrases of the form T* THE T*.

One other thing to mention about this puzzle: my final submitted version had two options at 11-Down. Either LAIMBEER or LAID OVER. Will went with LAID OVER. For those of you too young to remember the "Bad Boys" days of Pistons basketball in the late '80's and early '90's, Bill Laimbeer was probably the most disliked Detroit athlete ever — until Ndamukong Suh came along. Either LAIMBEER is too obscure, or he doesn't pass the "breakfast test".

I hope this thrills the throng.

– puzzle by Peter A. Collins

Though this isn't my debut, I'll take this opportunity to introduce myself — I'm a 28-year old rabbinical student and part-time special ed teacher living with my wife and two sons in Alon Shevut, a town on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

On to the puzzle: I got the idea after seeing Byron Walden and Robin Schulman's "wedding puzzle," which featured nine I DO rebus squares, including the central "IDO IDO IDO IDO IDO." I wanted to do something similar, and came up with "IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD." This was late 2011, and only my second attempt at constructing (the first attempt being what eventually became my debut puzzle), and I was not aware at the time that having a 13-square central answer would make gridding such a challenge. I ended up submitting a grid that had way too many 3-letter words (many of them ugly), obscure names and a 6-letter partial (!). Will rejected it, but indicated that he liked the idea and the central answer. Thankfully, I realized that I needed to scrap the whole grid and start over, and the result is what you see here. I hope you all enjoy it!

– puzzle by Daniel Landman

This is only my second published puzzle — I was introduced to crossword construction by Pete Collins, who coincidentally authored the puzzle from two days ago. Thanks Pete! I've also been inspired by Manny Nosowsky — a surgeon who published his first puzzle at age 59 (like me) and went on to become a legend in the crossword industry.

My original submission for this puzzle had ITS GOOD PR for one of the entries, clued as "This will help our image". I rather liked that one myself, but Will felt it seemed "made up" as a phrase. He liked the rest though, and I was able to repair the defect with surprisingly little impact on the rest of the grid.

If I squint real hard this puzzle grid looks like a diamond ring to me, with four prongs holding the main stone (imagination needed here) and some smaller baguettes in a swirl pattern — perfect for POPS THE QUESTION. Is anyone buying it?

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

Once again, I'm thrilled to be published in the NY Times, my 5th puzzle.

In my previous puzzles — all Sundays — I never had as few as six theme answers, as in today's offering. Having only six meant I could spread them out more, and I had much more fun/leeway filling in the non-theme answers. I love choosing interesting or rarely-seen long non-theme answers and then filling in the shorter answers around them. Among the 17 non-theme answers of 8 letters or more, we have BED OF ROSES, AGITATING, COMO ESTA and LOVE NEST.

DAIRY GODMOTHER was the seed; my original clue — which made my family laugh — was "She might make you a cheesecake you can't refuse." The clue was changed by Will, keeping it one hop away from the original phrase instead of two.

My first idea for a clue for SCIENCE DICTION was "Exceptional quality of Sir Patrick Stewart's Captain Picard," but you'd might have had to be a Trekkie to get it; I think Will's Stephen Hawking clue works quite well.

The first few versions of the puzzle — there were over 20 — had a 7th theme answer stretching across the middle row, but I found that it made everything too crowded and led to very weak fill (and something like 24 3-letter words). It was clued "Lament of the Best-in-Show runners-up at Westminster" with the answer: WE HAVEN'T THE DOGGIEST. Pity I couldn't fit it in since coincidentally the puzzle appears the same week as the Dog Show. Thanks to XWordinfo, it has seen the light of day.

– puzzle by Yaakov Bendavid

I first came up with the idea for this puzzle when I was 14. I had no idea how I was going to go about squeezing thirteen symmetrical theme entries in a particular order into a 15 x 15 grid — I wasn't even sure I'd be able to come up with a set of theme entries that would work at all! Anyway, the big breakthrough happened when I discovered JOHN Q for the J to Q arrangement. Unfortunately, I then had to find an entry that fit the D???W letter pattern. The only two entries I could find were DO NOW (either a contrived phrase or an awkward partial) and DEPEW (as in Chauncey Depew, a turn-of-the-century politician). I decided that DO NOW was the lesser of two evils and proceeded to the grid. I soon discovered that CHATTERBOX and KARATE CHOP were the same length, which allowed me to open up the grid a bit more, though I was still dissatisfied with the puzzle, since all the other theme entries were very short and the grid had 82 words.

Fast forward a few months to April 2012, after my 15th birthday. I was playing around with this idea some more and, after a substantial amount of grid wrangling, produced an 80-worder that replaced GET AT with GARMENT DISTRICT (a 15-letter entry). The fill had a few compromises and irksome "duplicates" in the down entries like GOES SOFT, though I was still very happy with how it turned out. After I submitted the puzzle, I noticed that I had absentmindedly clued GARMENT DISTRICT as "Big Apple district with many labels"; "Part of Manhattan's Midtown West" works much better. I also worked on a Z TO A puzzle to complement this one for a little while, though I couldn't come up with a satisfactory Q*J entry (the best I could think of was QZXJ ["Highest scoring Scrabble tiles"], which I felt would permanently mangle Amy Reynaldo's Scowl-o-Meter!).

In all, this puzzle was a lot of fun to construct, and I hope it makes for a fun solve as well!

– puzzle by David Steinberg

This is my second NYT puzzle publication (the first was Jan. 9, 2012). As an educator, husband, and father, I have to credit my loved ones and students as the inspiration for my puzzle ideas. My wife lets me bounce my crazy ideas off of her, my dad filled my childhood with puns, and my mom taught me to laugh at myself and to use humor when things grow uneasy. For example, awaiting the needle before donating at our school blood drive, I tried to cut the tension by saying, "PRESENT ARMS." Nearby students thought it was funny, but my phlebotomist was all business. Later on, I was in dad mode when I told my boys to "FORWARD MARCH" upstairs to bed. My oldest gave me a mock salute and said, "SIR, YES, SIR!" Et voila! The theme was born.

From there, the trick was to come up with the right combination of military commands with matching letter counts. COMPANY HALT worked nicely, but ABOUT FACE didn't make the final grid. I thought the fourth entry, READY AIM FIRE, added a little extra challenge because it contained three words instead of two. Plus that pattern gets echoed in the three-word response, albeit as separate entries.

Upon cluing, I already had "what blood donors do first" for PRESENT ARMS, and the others followed fairly easily. Will's editing bailed me out on 20-Across; originally, I had "Blunt month?" as the clue for FORWARD MARCH. The grid went through a number of iterations (I played with moving the two "SIR" entries around the grid) before Will gave his final stamp of approval. Kudos to him for his patience! I was also happy to place DIPHTHONG, PRESORTED, and IMPIETY (three new NYT puzzle words, if I'm not mistaken) into the grid. Lastly, I offer a genuine salute to all of our past and present military personnel. Thank you for the sacrifices you make to keep us safe! Peace to all.

– puzzle by Michael Dewey

ZHOUQIN (C.C.):

This idea occurred to me when I put WOODROW in a down slot one day & misread it as the two-word WOOD ROW. Don did all the hard work on the grid design. I initially used a 5 & 5 & 3 word break on the very top & bottom rows. Simply could not make the grid work, not to mention including a few long downs.

DON:

This idea places a burden on the construction, because we were stuck using lengths of words that must work out to rows and be symmetrically arranged. And then sticking WOOD ROW in the center made it even more difficult.

CC and I share filling and cluing. On a personal note, I was happy to get RUBINSTEIN into the grid. That was on my half of the grid. Way back when I was a senior in high school (1972), Rubinstein came to Cleveland to perform a recital of all Chopin music. I was in heaven, being a Chopin fan and a Rubinstein fan. I was witness to an extraordinary event. Other than that answer, it is not a very exciting grid for us to design, because we both like more complexity, with some longer entries. The theme really limited what we could do.

– puzzle by Zhouqin Burnikel and Don Gagliardo

It's probably a blessing and a curse to have to follow Patrick Berry, but someone has to do it, so today it might as well be me.

I wrote this puzzle in March 2013 and it was just my fourth attempt at a themeless grid. At the time I hadn't been having much success with themed puzzles, so I turned to themeless construction. Now, I enjoy creating themeless grids the most since they give you the freedom to experiment with fresh, fun phrases in a way that themed puzzles don't.

DOMINATRIX was my seed entry and I built upwards. I like many of the long phrases I got in there, but this puzzle shows my impatience to submit it since it has more short, less-than-stellar entries than I would normally prefer today (things like RESOW, AREAR, SALMI, DE ORO, I SHOT, and SNEE). If I could rework the grid now I might try putting DOMINATRIX in a different position just to see if the fill would be cleaner. It's probably a little strange seeing her on the bottom rather than on top, no?

The gentleman whose puzzle will appear in tomorrow's Sunday Times (Victor Fleming) was my mentor on themeless construction. He was critical of my first couple of attempts, but his criticism ended up helping me a lot. It gave me the focus to keep striving to create the best grid possible. So while I have my own qualms about this puzzle, I still think it's good, and my themeless grids have gotten progressively better since I made it.

I'd also like to take a second to plug my brand new, independent crossword website Devil Cross. I release a new puzzle every other Saturday, and though I ran one last week, I decided to drop a new one on Friday, and it's a contest puzzle! (Fair warning: Devil Cross puzzles may contain some R-rated language that you won't see in a Times puzzle)

– puzzle by Evan Birnholz

At the age of six, watching the credits roll after the annual TV airing of The Wizard of Oz, I saw "Directed by Victor Fleming" on the screen. "Mother," I shouted, "my name's on TV." She looked up from her knitting, but it was gone by then. "Uh huh," she said. I knew she thought that I'd imagined it. Neither my parents nor any of their friends were movie buffs, and my efforts to find someone who would vouch for what I'd seen on the screen were futile. I had to wait a year to prove I was right!

I've used my name once before in a puzzle — a Thursday Themeless in the New York Sun, in September 2004. Symmetrically juxtaposed to VICTOR FLEMING was the answer CHAMP AT THE BIT, for a synonym mini-theme.

Back to the puzzle at hand: Nine theme answers, with two crossing and a total of 97 letters, felt reasonable, vis-à-vis the universe of titles directed by the honoree. Will helped a bit on this after my first draft needed revising. I don't remember the specifics, but he suggested a film that was not in my original lineup. It was either Red Dust or Bombshell. He also rewrote about half my clues. Okay, 60%. Would you believe 65?

I wanted phrases and compound words for the theme, and I think Will did, too. That ruled out Adventure, Hula, Reckless, Renegades, Mantrap, and The Virginian. And some of Fleming's early work is not known at all, e.g. The Mollycoddle, Mama's Affair, Red Hot Romance, Empty Hands, and several others. I hated not to use Treasure Island, Captains Courageous, and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, because those titles are well known, if only from the novels that bear the same titles.

I admit to being self-indulgent in this puzzle. But c'mon, man! Victor Fleming directed 40+ films over a 29-year period. And his 125th birthday fell on a Sunday! How could I not make a puzzle about this?

– puzzle by A Namesake of 119-Across

Matthew:

I attended the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament for the first time in 2011. Roz Chast was the awards presenter that year. Before handing out the awards, she read a short essay. The essay humorously highlighted many of the entries that frequently appear in crosswords, commonly referred to as crosswordese. A year or so later, I returned to this essay and the idea of taking a set of common crossword entries and turning them into a puzzle. My idea was to make the crosswordese words the clues, and what would typically be the clues for these words, the answers.

I compiled a list of crosswordese words, but soon realized there needed to be more to this theme than just selecting a subset of these words and then developing theme answers that were of the appropriate length. So I revisited the list, and noticed a lot of these words began with the letter E. It then occurred to me that if all the words began with "E", a revealer for the puzzle could be CROSSWORDESE, which not only was a pun but also an apt description of the theme answer clues.

I passed the idea by Jeff, and he really liked it. One improvement he suggested immediately was to change one of the original theme clues — EEE (wide shoe spec) — to EMIR, as EEE was the only theme clue of the set that was not four letters long. Over time, there were further adjustments made in order to get theme answers to match up by length, which ultimately resulted in one of the original clues, the ever-popular EWER, being replaced by the equally crowd-pleasing ETUI.

In terms of filling the rest of the puzzle, we felt it was important to keep the crosswordese to a minimum. In general this is a good approach to take, but even more so when you're already drawing attention to crosswordese in the puzzle's theme. I think for the most part we were successful in this, the occasional ONO, ANAT, and OBOE notwithstanding.

Thanks for reading. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to work on my next puzzle: lesser-known, four-letter European rivers.

– puzzle by Matthew E. Paronto and Jeff Chen

I am quite excited to have my first puzzle published, and what began as a lark has become an engaging hobby. I solve the puzzle daily, and occasionally a puzzle takes a particular approach to playing with language that gives me an "I can do that!" feeling and sends me off in search of words and puns that fit my concept.

I no longer remember any particular puzzle that sparked the word-play part of my brain and led me to create this one, adding IST to familiar words. The challenge of course, was that the addition of IST had to change the meaning of the word entirely. There's no humor in changing "violin" to "violinist."

So to the word lists. I pored through lists of words containing IST, mentally subtracting the IST to find those words that could then be built into phrases that had the potential to win a chuckle once the IST was put back in. So from "cubist" to "cub" to "cub reporter" to CUBIST REPORTER.

I think my favorite answer has to be SLEEPER CELLISTS. Having played in the wind section of orchestras throughout my youth, I know what it is to count many dozens of measures of rests before an entrance, trying to maintain concentration, while the string players played without pause. It always seemed possible that someone might one day fall asleep, but I never thought it would be the cellists!

I was pleased with the phrases I was able to create, and even more pleased that Will (finally!) liked them, too. (I don't think I have to confess here just how many of my submissions have not made the grade...)

So now that I've met Will's standards and made my debut, am I a strict constructionIST?

– puzzle by Ruth B. Margolin

Inspiration for this puzzle came from my 30-year-old son Marc (whom Will bounced on his knee at my home about 27 years ago), who sells items on eBay for his London office-salvage business. One of his recent items was a plaque with the theme message, for which only the original WE'LL needed to be changed to WE WILL to break perfectly. By dumb luck, Will was short of non-rebus Thursdays, so it appears today only 19 days after he OK'd it.

I clue puzzles hard by having as many "new" clues as possible, requiring some thought and reasoning to solve, rather than ones that can be solved at sight by solvers with good memories. Most of the new factual clues here come from Internet research, such as 52A, 63A, 8D and 34D.

An added requirement to my harder clues is that only general knowledge should be required to understand them, even if the fact itself isn't well-known. For example, anyone from New York should know that AMAZIN (14A) is associated with the Mets, so it shouldn't be surprising that a website all about the Mets is called Amazin' Avenue.

One other clue nicety here that might not be obvious: a factual balance between new pop culture (like 18A, 55A), older (40A, 25D), and historical (42A, 10D). I made sure that all my factual references could be quickly and authoritatively verified with Google, and passed that info along to Will with the puzzle.

While some of my new clues for uncapitalized answers also come from Web research ("Time-stretching" for 41D SLO-MO came from a Wikipedia article), I can often think of something fresh by just letting my mind wander. That's where I got 56A and 1D, for instance.

Will is obviously on-board with all of this thinking, since he kept about 75% of my clues, including all the ones cited above.

In the 1,000+ crosswords I've constructed and the 5,000+ I've edited (for the New York newspaper Newsday and Puzzle Social) since adopting Crossword Compiler in 2000, I've found that with careful grid patterning it's never necessary to use obscurities, even for wide-open grids such as the 72-worder here. This sometimes requires that I check Google News and Google Books, to be sure that words I think are in common current use actually are. I look forward to the day where this fussiness will be standard procedure for constructors, so we can finally bid the OLEOs, OLIOs and ANILs of crosswordese an unfond farewell.

Anyone wishing to throw bouquets or stones at me, or a constructor wishing to learn more about my "crud-free" approach to puzzlemaking, is welcome to contact me through my website.

– puzzle by Stanley Newman