Puzzle 139: Freestyle 107. Change you can believe in.

Last Friday’s freestyle solution

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Word count: 68
Mean word length: 5.71

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I went for 68 on this one not because I wanted to (is it ever because I want to?) but because the top right stack demanded it. The whole thing started with 4-Across and 18-Across — of course, my favorite technique of separating seed entries by one row/column and seeing what fits in between them. Then 9-Down presented itself and, well, I couldn’t not go with that answer, right? It made the bottom left a little more difficult to build, of course, but I did find a nice stack that somehow was able to fit in there too. Also, I didn’t mean to stack (I’m not giving anything away here) two musical genres next to each other at 37-Down and 38-Down, but I think the clues are self-explanatory enough that it shouldn’t be an issue.

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Puzzle 138: Freestyle 106. The pause that refreshes.

Last Tuesday’s freestyle solution

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Word count: 72
Mean word length: 5.42

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Every so often, I like to find two 15s, or a 15 and a 13, or two 13s from my seed list that share a middle letter and build a grid outward from those; this was one of those grids. Its fairly painless to do grids like this if you arrange it the way I did here, because there’s fairly little room for potential conflict or roadblocks from one corner to another. There’s still plenty of flow from one section to another, but there isn’t much in the design of the grid that could cause problems in multiple sections once you have the two central entries set. Those two entries neatly set off construction of grids like this into quadrants.

Oh, and 21-Across… it’s one of my favorite puns. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

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Puzzle 137: Freestyle 105. Working on a deeper level.

Last Friday’s freestyle collab solution

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Word count: 72
Mean word length: 5.39

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With March Madness in full swing, something out of the ordinary always seems to happen in the college basketball landscape. So I figured, why not do something in a grid that I wouldn’t usually do? I put a pair of 12-letter entries four from the top and bottom rows and stacked three sevens above it on the top and below it on the bottom. The 12-letter portion of my seed list was getting a little long and it was time for me to trim a bit from it. The first one of those seeds, came thanks to a coworker. He didn’t say anything like “You should totally put that in a crossword” — I’ll be honest, I don’t often actually consider putting something in a grid that my friends/family/acquaintances tell me I should totally put in a grid, though it has rarely happened — but the light bulb nonetheless came on when he uttered this term.

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Puzzle 136: Freestyle 104. Feel the madness…

Last Tuesday’s freestyle solution

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Word count: 70
Mean word length: 5.40

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You’ll have to excuse me about the clue for 23-Across. March Madness is beginning, and I couldn’t not include some sort of reference to it in the clues. I fully and completely immerse myself into the college basketball landscape this time of year. I follow it the whole season, but this is my favorite month of the year simply for this reason.

Look familiar? This is another grid with a middle stack and two 15s running down either side of the grid. What can I say? I had two 13s that I really wanted to get into a grid (33-Across and 37-Across), and, again, I didn’t want to create a pair of big stairsteps in the middle of the grid just to take away 15-letter entries.

It had been an internal running gag within myself about 39-Across; despite that it’s only three letters long (it was on my seed list), it just would never seem to fit in a grid. I couldn’t even tuck it into a corner; this dinky three-letter entry would just keep not working in grid after grid. And now for this grid, I wasn’t at all even trying to fit that entry in at all, and it just happened to fit into that slot with dumb luck. It’s like what they say you should do when you can’t find something… you stop looking for it, because it will eventually turn up when you’re not looking for it. So I guess I should stop trying to fit certain seed entries into a grid, in order that it might find its way into one eventually anyway.

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Puzzle 135: Freestyle Collaboration 1, With Sam Ezersky. A team effort!

Last Friday’s freestyle solution

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Word count: 70
Mean word length: 5.40

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Well, here it is… the first collaboration on the Club 72 website. And it’s with a fellow constructor whom I enjoy greatly… Sam Ezersky at The Grid Kid! I had surmised that our styles of constructing would go together extremely well… and this was definitely proven out during the construction and cluing process.  Sam approached me with a middle skeleton, if you will, and we worked outward from there. Sam was on a real roll here, as most of the fill in this grid is his. It sort of balanced out, because most of the clues were mine. However, we both collaborated on both the clues and the fill, so this was a true team effort! Seriously, go do his puzzles on The Grid Kid after you’re done with this one, because you will be blown away.

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Puzzle 134: Freestyle 103. I promise, you’ve never seen this grid before anywhere else. (But you might see it in a few weeks with a mysterious pseudonym.)

Last Tuesday’s freestyle solution

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Word count: 72
Mean word length: 5.39

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Before I go on, I am very happy to report that there will be a very special collaborative freestyle appearing this Friday! I am very excited to co-present it here, and I am very honored to be working with this collaborator. I had theorized that our styles would mesh very well, and I couldn’t have been more right.

As for this grid, 17-Across was the obvious seed for it. Curling is gaining more and more of a following in the US, though I’d still classify it as a cult following. Color me a part of the movement. I hadn’t planned on the quasi-four stack in the upper left and lower right — I was kinda forced into it — but I made it work. Some balk at helper squares in the very corners of a grid, mostly because they’re more unsightly there than anywhere else in the grid (I can’t argue that they look kinda awkward, sure). But you have to know that this grid has been constructed by someone who just grabs whatever clothes off the hangers in the morning that their hands land on to wear for the day, so I never have much cared about appearance in any aspect of my life.

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Puzzle 133: Freestyle 102. Take a shot in the dark.

Last Friday’s freestyle solution

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Word count: 68
Mean word length: 5.62

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I don’t usually do things like intersect 8-stacks across with 8-stacks down — fill usually suffers when you do those sorts of things — but this construction was made easier and more sparkly when I did that. What is now 42-Across had been split into a 4-letter and 3-letter entry. The lower left corner was the first section in the grid that I worked on, and, by dumb luck, the entry at 42-Across appeared to me and happened to fit (the central answers at 8-Down and 36-Across were the seeds) because the terminal letter of what is now 42-Across happened to be in the right place. Like all creative breakthroughs happen, I said, “I wonder if this will work,” and it did. I was concerned that the upper right wouldn’t work as well with what the lower left gave me, but I was wrong. Despite appearances, the toughest section of the grid to construct was actually the upper left!

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Puzzle 132: Freestyle 101. Anything but elementary.

Last Tuesday’s freestyle solution

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Word count: 72
Mean word length: 5.44

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11-stacks almost never end well when I construct them. I usually have a much tougher time building the other stack than the stack I made from the seed entry. Why don’t you try two seed entries, you may ask? Before this grid, I would have answered, “I have no idea why I didn’t.” Usually, I’d construct one of the 11-stacks, then have to work around that half of the grid before I even considered trying to build the other stack. But this came about rather unusually and conveniently; the upper left stack left so many options that I was able to stop, go construct the bottom right stack — which also worked out incredibly flexibly — and then play around with the rest of the grid. I think this is the most smoothly an 11-stack has ever gone for me with respect to the construction process.

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Puzzle 131: Freestyle 100. Look alive out there!

Last Friday’s freestyle solution

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Word count: 70
Mean word length: 5.46

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I was about ready to prepare another statement of apology for you, because this was going to be a 66-word grid. Originally, the two-square bars in the upper left and lower right weren’t there. I had a full fill at 66 words and started to clue it. But the top left and bottom right were… how shall I say it… boring. It was clean, but it felt more than clean; it felt sterile. There wasn’t any zip. Furthermore, I couldn’t have had very many options for those corners, because I felt like I got lucky to get a clean fill at 66 words and I couldn’t find much else. So I scrapped those corners and made it 70. That obviously opened up my options greatly — you know me by now, I prefer content over openness any day of the week and twice on Sunday (whatever that means).

After I get done with cluing each grid, I go through the whole list of clues, looking at each clue/entry pair one by one just as a final check. I’m glad I did it this time, because I caught two significant clue words that were also entries, and I caught one clue that was outright wrong. A real head-slapper.

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Puzzle 130: Freestyle 99. Going whichever way the wind blows.

Last Tuesday’s freestyle solution

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Word count: 72
Mean word length: 5.39

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Construction on this grid moved pretty strictly in a clockwise fashion starting in the upper right with 6-Across and 17-Across. I know those two entries aren’t overall debuts, but I still wanted to use those as seeds. 50-Across and 23-Down may look like they were seeds, but they just fell in during the natural process of construction.

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