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AMANDA: Always a thrill to be back in the NYT! I hope everyone is doing alright, staying sane and healthy, and continuing to fight for much-needed social justice. Speaking of which, there are a handful of wonderful folks in the puzzle community who are doing puzzles-for-donations. If you're looking for a way to do some good while also getting your hands on some amazing puzzles, look no further than the list below:

1. Erik Agard is raising money for 1StruggleKC. If you go to their website and send Erik a screenshot of your donation receipt to agarderik@gmail.com, he'll send you some old, unreleased crosswords.
2. Paolo Pasco is raising money for the Black Lives Matter cause of your choice in exchange for a handful of puzzles by various constructors. If you go to this link you can find the details on how to donate, as well as what puzzles you'll be receiving.
3. Eric Berlin is raising money for Feeding America with his "Social Distancing Puzzle" pack:" eleven challenging puzzles to solve with a partner, over Zoom, or in the same room." Click on this link for instructions on how to donate and receive the puzzles. Your donation will get you two packs of puzzles (one for each solver) and a third file with hints and solutions.
4. Lone Shark Games has put together a puzzle pack of "Marching Bands For The Marchers." When you donate Campaign Zero to end police brutality, you'll receive your puzzle pack.

And if you're looking for some additional puzzles to solve while staying at home, I post new puzzles to my site every day.

ROSS: I'm donating my payment for today's puzzle to Violence in Boston, Inc.

If you're looking to get into crossword constructing — and especially if you identify as POC, womxn, or LGBTQ+ — I'd be thrilled to offer whatever assistance I can to help you get your puzzles published. Contact me via Twitter, Instagram, or rosswordpuzzles.com.

– puzzle by Amanda Rafkin and Ross Trudeau

YACOB: I love themes that play with word movement within the themers. I feel like they can lead to a strong aha moment, since, at first glance, the theme answers might make no sense. I hope you all enjoy it!

In case you were curious, here are some of the themers that didn't make the cut: HA[RPI]NGON, S[PACE]CREW, S[PITT]AKE, F[REED]IVE.

CHAD: Super excited to be making my NYT crossword debut. This acceptance came after a half dozen or so unsuccessful attempts, so for any aspiring constructors out there, definitely keep at it!

All credit goes to Yacob for this theme idea. As for the fill and clues, I tend to enjoy more trivia-y content, and some of my favorite clues of ours that made it through the editing process are 14A, 2D (loved those bands in high school!), and 58D (one of my all-time favorite shows). Very cool to see this run as a Thursday; some of the clues have definitely been Thursday-ed up a bit, but hopefully nothing too tricky!

– puzzle by Yacob Yonas and Chad Horner

I first experienced the deeply missed 37-Across — who would have been 64 last week — through Kitchen Confidential. I was captivated by his vivid stories of youthful summers in a French 42-Across village, and the characters, (including 24-Down), who make up the "pirate crews" in restaurants. For the clue, my intent was to pay tribute with a line from the book that I feel captures a bit of his adventurous spirit.

This is the first themeless I built "middle-out" rather than generally from Seattle toward Miami. My goal was to keep the center open and let the grid flow. The editorial team made fill changes in the NW and NE — I had originally submitted 1/2/3-Down as HERSH / ALOHA / LALAW, and HERSH / ELAH was a no-go. Despite the inelegance of an abbreviation at 1-Across, I'm happy with the edit — particularly the duplicate clue for 14-Across and 3-Down. Sometimes these can feel forced, but I think the wording works quite naturally here. Elsewhere, the NE corner originally had PHONE/ERO — I figured the flexibility of a trickier 9-Across clue was worth the niche classical music reference.

This is my first publication since the formal introduction of constructor feedback to the editorial process, and I really enjoyed the opportunity. I'm always trying to learn about the art of cluing, and our exchange was very productive. Many of my original clues did make the cut, including 35- and 39-Across — answers I'd selected with those specific clues in mind. It's satisfying to feel like the final product retains my voice.

– puzzle by Hal Moore

I love the long entries across the middle row of this puzzle. Fun to debut 69-Across! And back when I submitted the puzzle in January, I had no idea how relevant the question mark at the end of the clue for 66-Across would prove to be.

My daughter Eva was among those who graduated from high school in this unusual year, and at about noon on what was to have been the day of her 66-Across (which she was letting pass without comment), it occurred to me wonder aloud what she'd think of a do-it-yourself version. She loved the idea, and her would-be date—the one person outside of the family who had recently visited after weeks of isolation—was also game, so Eva and I started hanging up lights while her older sister planned a menu, went to the grocery store, and began cooking. Eventually, we all dressed up in finery from previous events, Eva's date appeared bearing irises from the family garden, and friends and family joined via Zoom as we served the honored guests at a card table and did the Cupid Shuffle together in the living room.

I envisioned an answer key as has been produced, but had not planned to include any visual cues in the puzzle itself, so those of you grateful for the extra help provided by the squares within squares can thank the editorial team!

Finally, although 45-Down is not well known in the US, his appearance today is timely as he's celebrated with a national holiday in the Czech Republic on July 6.

– puzzle by Laura Taylor Kinnel

I'm thrilled to be making my NYT debut! A quick thank you to Ross Trudeau, my parents, and my girlfriend for their help and support in this process.

Devising novel theme ideas has always been the toughest part of construction for me. To combat this (bear with me here as my nerdy desperation comes out) I began inspecting things I'd see in daily life for names that could do double duty. Finally, though, I got the greatest birthday present a guy can ask for: a workable revealer. They say big things come in small packages, but I guess the stuff AROUND the package can come in handy, too.

I initially shied away from using TOILET as a "wrapping paper," and the version of this puzzle I submitted used GRAPH instead. Will and the editorial team encouraged me to look past the breakfast test and suggested A TOI / LET GO as a theme combo, and I think the puzzle is all the better for it. An earlier version of the puzzle had ASMR / MR OWL in the northern section, but that didn't pass muster with test solvers. I'm especially happy with 59A in this grid, and the 8D/54A connection especially tickles my fancy as a fan of movie trivia.

I hope you find something nice wrapped in this one!

– puzzle by Kevin Patterson

Very excited for my NYT debut! Big thanks to my mentor Myles Callum, and to the editing team who helped me greatly improve on my original idea.

I constructed my first "crossword puzzles" by hand on deployment in Afghanistan to keep my Marines entertained back in 2012. Needless to say, they were terrible and broke every rule in the book. Who knew they had to be symmetrical? Or shouldn't have typos? I've been constructing properly(ish) for about a year and a half now and am excited to have a new lifelong hobby that I love.

While I'm quite happy with how clean this grid came out, I've learned a lot in the last ten months since this was accepted. I would love to have more sparkly, long, non-themers than LIMA BEAN and DRY GOODS. Not too scintillating, in my opinion.

The editorial team (thankfully) changed most of my cluing, but one they did keep, which I'm thrilled about is 1-Across. My mom was my biggest inspiration and champion, but she passed away shortly before I received my first crossword acceptance. She was a shoe designer who got her start at Bass so that being my first entry ever in the NYT gives me the warm and fuzzies.

– puzzle by Chase Dittrich

After solving a themeless puzzle, I usually look at the grid as a whole and try to figure out how the constructor started building it. What entries went into the grid first? For this puzzle, the first two entries in the grid were the intersecting entries SLOW CLAP and TERRY CREWS, the latter inspired by the Brooklyn Nine-Nine marathon my daughter and I were on last summer. From there, the constructing moved to the NW, then over to the NE, and then finished in the SW. Thanks to the editing team for the creative pruning, rewriting, and tweaking of clues that greatly improved the final product.

Andrew Kingsley and I are currently deep into preparations for the fourth edition of Boswords, Boston's Crossword Puzzle Tournament. As you might expect, this year's event will be ONLINE only and will be held on the afternoon of Sunday, July 26. Registration is now open at www.boswords.org, where you can find more details about the tournament. We hope you can join us!

– puzzle by John Lieb

LEE: My grandfather, Robert F. Griggs, discovered the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and was the first person to get to the site of the June 6, 1912, "Katmai eruption" (actually the eruption of Novarupta). I tried constructing a puzzle with the intent of having it ready for June 6, 2012. From that exercise, I learned much greater respect for the crossword constructors.

About a year ago, I saw one of Jeff Chen's puzzles with right-left symmetry like I had been trying to use. I sent Jeff my half-puzzle and asked if he had any interest. He said, the reason for a Katmai/Novarupta themed puzzle passed with missing its 100th anniversary, but he and I worked on this more general one.

I have made a number of trips Katmai National Monument and Park (now that it is a National Park and Preserve, not just a Monument). I also attended most of the Alaska Volcano Observatory meetings during the years I was on staff at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and took a UAF class, "The International Volcanological Field Trip," that was given in Katmai.

– puzzle by Lee Higbie and Jeff Chen

The theme for this puzzle came to me in December 2017, almost a year before I started constructing crosswords. In January 2019, after sitting on it for a while and making my first few puzzles, I was finally ready to try it out! The answer to 110-Across provided the inspiration for this theme.

The puzzle began as a 15x15 around the entries OPEN CCON, WORD TO THE YY, 22-Across, and 110-Across. After feedback from the Times editors regarding the placement of the double letters in the theme answers, I decided to expand the puzzle to a 21x21—I was excited for the opportunity to use more of the items on my list! (On the cutting room floor, for various reasons: PENNYYY THE CLOWN, JESSE OWNN, MAYONAA JARS, GIVE PP A CHANCE, TIP OF THE IIBERG, WHAT LL IS NEW, BELLY OF THE BBT, IN KK OF EMERGENCY, OONAP, and DD NUTS, among a couple dozen others. Also, sorry to Adam L. about GOODNESS GRHH.)

I'm very happy with the way this puzzle turned out. My favorite clues are for 67-Across and 114-Across; the clue for 46-Across was written after reading this comment from Kameron Austin Collins. The editors did a fantastic job here, and I particularly appreciate their flexibility and willingness to go back and forth on some of the clues. Thanks!

– puzzle by Wyna Liu

My jumping-off point was BACK TO THE FUTURE. It's my favorite movie, and I wanted to feature it in an NYT puzzle. It's been used three times before, once riffing on PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE and twice in puzzles where it's entered backward. But no puzzle had ever included it in a RIGHT/LEFT/FRONT/BACK sequence using phrases of the form direction/two-word preposition/the/final word, where each preposition is different. Aha! That's my hook!

To obey regular crossword symmetry (i.e., 180-degree rotational symmetry), the first and last theme entries must be the same length. So step one was finding a phrase of the form RIGHT XX THE XXXXX.

XWord Info has a great tool for finding such patterns. Entering the regular expression ^right..the.....$ on the Finder page — or just a normal search for right??the????? — returns three possibilities: RIGHT ON THE MONEY, RIGHT TO THE POINT, and RIGHT IN THE LURCH. The third one, however, is not a standard English phrase. It's crossed out in the search results because it's a nonsense thematic phrase from another puzzle (a play on LEFT IN THE LURCH). Of the two remaining expressions, RIGHT ON THE MONEY is the liveliest.

The LEFT and FRONT phrases also had to balance, and I found the best pairing at length 14 (the aforementioned LEFT IN THE LURCH plus FRONT OF THE LINE). From there, it was smooth sailing (with an emphasis on smooth since early-week puzzles need fill that's familiar to a wide range of solvers).

– puzzle by Alex Eaton-Salners

I'm very excited to share my Thursday debut. This is just a basic ‘drop a letter' theme, with the twist of moving the drop-a-letter part to the clues, and then incorporating the instructions within the grid.

In deciding which letter to nix, I knew it needed to be a less common letter of the alphabet, but not so obvious as to give itself away (I suspect that if there were a dozen clues containing the letter Q solvers would have caught on very quickly). And although the drop-a-letter gimmick only applied to the clues, it seemed inelegant to include the letter anywhere in the grid, other than the instructional "LETTER ?" entry. But I would need a crossing word using the mystery letter, and it bothered me to include a random word that contained the letter. I decided to go with W because a few years back I had a Sunday puzzle (in another publication) that did the drop-a-letter thing with the title NOWHERE ("No W Here"). In homage to that puzzle I went with a shortened form of the revealer, parsing NOW as "no W", so that both the across and down entries containing the W would be part of the theme.

In addition to the entries REMOVE THE/ LETTER W/ FROM CLUES and the NOW mini revealer, I had 11 entries that came from W clues. I thought 11 was a good amount (and allowed the editors to nix one if they didn't like it and still have an even 10). Instead, Will and the team somehow managed to add 5 more W clues to entries already in the puzzle! My favorite of their additions is "Swaying just before a disaster" for UHOH.

Some clues/entries in my notes that I couldn't manage to fit in include "Warm cover" for SLEEVE and "Group of swingers" for CHORUS.

Finally, I remember seeing puzzles where constructors have altered their names in keeping with a puzzle's theme. I thought about requesting "Robyn Eintraub" for my byline. But aside from making the gimmick too obvious, it would have also necessitated changing the editor byline to "Ill Shortz" and that just seemed like a bad idea.

– puzzle by Robyn Weintraub

I've come to learn that my good luck charm in puzzle writing is slipping in a video game reference (in the past, that's included MEGAMAN and ITSAMEMARIO). Nearly all of my accepted puzzles have had one, and a lot of my non-accepted ones didn't. Well, guess what? This one has TWO (19- and 23-Across). Don't worry, though, they're pretty accessible. Even the luddites of the world shouldn't have a problem in that area, I hope.

I believe that crosswords are a place to celebrate the language we use, so I always relish the chance to put in words and phrases and cultural references that have meaning in my own life, and if someone completes the puzzle but didn't know them, well then hey! They've now learned about something!

I wasn't sure about this puzzle's chances making it through Will Shortz's "to be considered" stack, especially since I'll admit that the grid layout isn't exactly elegant. But I think what did it was the breadth of interesting longer entries that the Crossword Gods allowed me to fit together, from my favorite wrestling hold at 47-Across, to a fun regional phrase to say at 15-Down (try it as a minced oath, it's great!), to an iconic piece of animation history at 10-Down (another one of my lifelong interests). That plus a few fun "Question Mark" clues (always my favorite to write and solve), such as mine unaltered at 46-Across, mine tweaked slightly at 42-Across, and a very clever one supplied by the editing team at 40-Across, make this hopefully a enjoyable puzzle for everyone to chew through.

I also always love sticking in at least one "fact clue," like the one at 30-Across, which you'll hopefully write in and say, "Huh! I never knew that!" In my mind, that's one of the greatest joys in puzzling.

– puzzle by Grant Thackray

On the first iteration of this puzzle I received feedback that the editorial team liked the top half, but not the bottom. Sadly, this meant redoing the entire puzzle, as any three of the eight interlocking 15 letter entries lock in a good chunk of the remaining five.

These low-word count, unusual grid designs seem to often get mixed reviews. I personally enjoy them from a solver's perspective, as I find the odds of a rough cross decrease — the less desirable bits of crossword glue holding these grids together tend to cross the long spanners that are (hopefully!) known to most.

In this case, I'm not proud of ARY, ILEA or ENES — but happy with the crosses on all three. AGNI and ST VITUS are tough, but I think both fair and worth knowing.

This was my first puzzle to be accepted by the NYT mid last year. Looking back, I would have swapped RIPA for RIPE (and TESS to TESH) to reduce the proper name count in the north east, and insisted that at least 1 of the long 15s was an obviously modern phrase/term. And, being picky, the fact that IN A appears twice in the spanners is also a bit of a detractor.

That all said, I enjoyed making it in the wonderful company of Yvo and Marzena, and am quite pleased with how it came out. Hope everyone enjoys!

– puzzle by Royce Ferguson

I don't remember how I came up with this theme, just that the concept came to me suddenly. (Perhaps I ought to learn how to go into such a "crossword theme trance" at will.) However, I distinctly recall playing CHINTZ in a Scrabble game a little while afterwards, which reminded me of the theme idea and inspired me to start working on the puzzle. I wanted the anagrammed words to have at least four letters, and found that there didn't seem to be too many options for theme answers. The only potential theme answer I remember leaving on the cutting room floor, ironically enough, was GINSU FORCE [Army wielding knives from infomercials?]

I'm proud of how this grid turned out, with answers like ACQUIESCE, ALCHEMIST, VOLCANIC ASH, ALEC BALDWIN and I'M IN LOVE among the longer fill, and nothing that feels like a major compromise. I also think it's nice that the puzzle ended up being pangrammatic, especially given its theme.

I wasn't sure whether or not to include a revealer — ALPHABETICAL ORDER lacks subtlety, and takes up lots of space — so I began constructing the puzzle without one. However, close to the end of the process, I noticed I fortuitously had EASY on the bottom row and could make a minor change elsewhere to include ABC (at 47-Down). I clued EASY as [____ as 47-Down (Like the theme of this puzzle?)], though I guess Will preferred using just ABC as the revealer, to complement the title (which, happily, is the one I submitted).

Speaking of the clues, I'm glad that most of my original clues for the theme answers made the cut, especially those for ABET AROUND THE BUSH and BELOW MACARONI. My original clue for OCEAN DEIST mentioned Poseidon (though perhaps a devout follower of Ægir was among the test solvers, and objected to my favoritism toward Greek mythology?)

Until next time, happy solving!

– puzzle by Trenton Charlson

I'm donating payment for this utterly deceitful puzzle to FactCheck.org.

I was glad to see the editorial team go with a straight-ahead, non-euphemistic clue for ODS [Some drug cases, for short]. I have a genetic disorder that has made pain management a significant part of my adult life, and my personal relationship with opioids can best be described as an uneasy detente. While I appreciate that some folks might have painful associations with an answer like ODS, maintaining awareness about a national crisis that hasn't receded dramatically is personally important to me.

If you're looking to get into crossword constructing, and especially if you identify as non-male, LGBTQ+, or as a person of color, I'd be thrilled to offer whatever assistance I can to help you get your puzzles published. Contact me via Twitter (@trudeauross) or my personal puzzle site, rosswordpuzzles.com.

– puzzle by Ross Trudeau