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Hey everyone! I'm a 14-year-old student from Singapore. I'm thrilled (and a little stunned) to be debuting today as one of the youngest constructors in the themeless puzzle genre. It was pretty surreal opening that acceptance email in the middle of the school day, which was followed by roughly 10 minutes of jumping and dancing (Sit down, Bryan, geography's starting soon …).

I started constructing last November while on a trip to Vietnam, and since then it's definitely cemented its spot into my daily life — I often jot down entries in the margins of my notes or think of clues in between classes.

Ironically, despite my passion for constructing, I'm still not that great at solving crosswords! I do enjoy picking up new words and phrases with each solve.

This puzzle was actually my first submission to a publication. My favorite entry has to be STAR-NOSED MOLE — such a bizarre and fascinating little creature. I'm very grateful to the Times puzzle editing team for their patience and guidance throughout the whole process.

Outside of crosswords, I enjoy acting, writing, drawing and cycling (which is the best way I know to clear my head).

Thanks for solving my first themeless puzzle! I hope you all enjoyed working through it as much as I did putting it together.

– puzzle by Bryan Cheong

This puzzle's theme was inspired by Jeff Chen's commentary on this website! Jeff is an incredibly prolific and accomplished constructor, so his commentary was a tremendous resource when I was learning about crossword construction. One puzzle had the entry TETE-A-TETE, which Jeff noted appears commonly, partly thanks to its "perfect vowel-consonant symmetry" which is friendly to construct around. I thought to myself, "I wonder if I could make a whole puzzle with alternating vowels!" I was working on a puzzle with a similar theme at the time, which was published in the NYT on January 16, 2024 (my debut puzzle!). If you liked today's puzzle, you should solve that one if you haven't already.

Other than VOWEL as a revealer, the grid was a blank slate which can be both a blessing and a curse. I opted for this grid with the two double stacks which quickly resolved my blank slate "problem." They were tricky to wrangle, but too striking and irresistible to pass up. I iterated on and off for over a year before happily submitting this version. Hope you enjoyed it!

I used a regex query along with Adam Aaronson's invaluable Wordlisted tool to modify my wordlist. Some numbers: Only 5% of my wordlist has alternating vowels, but that's mostly driven by the longer words: While 29% of 3-, 4-, and 5-letter words have alternating vowels, only 14 out of nearly 13,000 (or 0.1%) 15-letter words have alternating vowels. Of those 14, only 3 (!) begin with a vowel (the other one was ON A POSITIVE NOTE). Being able to stack two pairs of those 15-letter words in a relatively open grid with a limited wordlist demonstrates just how useful that vowel pattern is to constructors. Interestingly, I had nearly the opposite constraint in my first NYT puzzle, where the short fill was significantly more impacted than the long fill.

– puzzle by Marshal Herrmann