Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!
The pain in my toches with constructing this one was the lower left. The framework was 19-Across/25-Across/54-Across/7-Down (OK, it’s not a symmetric framework, but it’s how this puzzle started), and those four didn’t budge even from the moment when this puzzle was just a twinkle in its constructor’s eye. The rest of the puzzle went like clockwork… and I even got in another word from the seed list at 37-Down. But the lower left, for some reason, didn’t come to me as easily as the rest.
My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is the origin of the word “laconic” as in 47-Down. If you do a little background reading on it, it’s pretty entertaining.
As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?
As always, share this link! Pass it around! New freestyle puzzle on Tuesday!
As promised yesterday, I’ve got a guest freestyle puzzle today! Jason Mueller’s the name, and this 72-word freestyle’s the game. (I have no idea what that means.) Jason emailed me a few weeks ago with this freestyle puzzle for my consideration. I solved it right after I got the email, and replied that I very happy to have it on the site.
Jason tells me that he is (as of this blog post) unpublished, but will have his major publication debut on Sunday, May 31, in the LA Times. (Impressive enough, but a Sunday debut is even more impressive, still!) This is a pretty darned polished freestyle construction with some fun entries in it. In fact, the one running across the middle is… well, was… on my own seed list. He is from Missouri, an alum of the University of Missouri, and was captain of their quiz bowl team. I am very happy to present this freestyle from Jason, I look very much forward to his LA Times debut, and I look forward to many more of his puzzles to come! Nice job, Jason.
Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!
Before I say anything else, I want to plug something new and exciting from Club 72 headquarters: there will be a guest freestyle puzzle tomorrow! I got an email a couple of weeks ago with a submission for a guest freestyle for my website. His name is Jason Mueller, and he’ll be making his major publication debut soon… but I’m very happy to put a guest puzzle of his on this site tomorrow. Check it out!
If you’ve been following me, you know that I’m a big “Seinfeld” fan and like to put in a reference whenever I can (and whenever it’s reasonable) in my offerings. Well, in this one, the “Seinfeld” reference is the seed itself. (It was going to happen eventually!) That episode is also the source of the quote in the title of this blog post, in case you were curious.
Every puzzle has its tribulations, and this one was no different: I got three-quarters around this puzzle’s construction when I realized I had a silly dupe. That forced me to tear out quite a bit of what I had done already, especially in the middle, and reconstruct. I still got a few entries from the old seed list into the puzzle, including 1-Across (obviously), 45-Down, and 61-Across.
As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?
As always, share this link! Pass it around! After the guest freestyle tomorrow, there’ll be a new freestyle puzzle on Friday!
Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!
Since I posted my first themed puzzle for this site, I guess you could say I got a mild case of the themed puzzle bug and put this one together this past week. I don’t want to spoil the theme of this puzzle too much, but I will say that I had a lot more fun constructing it than I thought I would going in. I will also say that I started constructing this puzzle by hand, but went to the app because of time constraints. I dialed down the clue difficulty a bit, but not too much, because this is a themed puzzle and I didn’t want it to have too much of a freestyle feel to it.
As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?
As always, share this link! Pass it around! New freestyle puzzle on Tuesday!
Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!
The slightly compartmental nature of this puzzle allowed me to include quite a few seeds: 15-Across (explanation below), 57-Across, 12-Down, 37-Down, and 43-Down. Whenever you see an unusual block arrangement, like that odd pair of offset crosses, and/or you see a “cheater” square (I hate that term… I prefer “helper” square) to accommodate a corner, that means that I was really trying to get a stack to work. That was the case with the upper left section of this puzzle. That’s a pretty small corner in the upper right and lower left; I usually don’t like to make them too tight, but at least that allowed me to put in some colorful sixes.
My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is, by far, the factoid at 15-Across. In fact, it was a seed entry not because of the entry per se, but because I wanted to include that clue for it.
As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?
As always, share this link! Pass it around! New themed puzzle on Friday!
Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!
Hey, imagine that! An actual variety puzzle today! Back to the old steady topic of anagrams for this one today. It’s a little different than the others, though… I’ve got the missing sentences with two words, but the difference is that one of the words is the other word minus its first letter and anagrammed. (I’ve got an example inside the link.) You’ll see 26 sentences, and that’s because the first letter of the longer word will be different for each sentence… I think that might help you.
I’ll be back with another crossword puzzle, of course, on Tuesday. The answer to Freestyle Puzzle 27 will appear there too. But I hope this will tide you over until then.
Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!
Another 7×7 freestyle offering. These are, as I’ve said before, the hardest high-word count freestyles to make, but they’re the most satisfying. I had one and only one seed to start the puzzle, and that was 15-Across. Other mini-seeds emerged during construction of this puzzle, including 16-Across, 38-Down, 64-Across, 66-Across, and 67-Across.
The construction started in the upper left with the seed, and drifted over to the upper right; once I had the top half done, I moved to the lower left, figuring that 38-Down would be the most restrictive entry in the lower half of the grid. After I did the lower left, it took me a surprising amount of time to finish the last quadrant, the lower right, even though the entry point to it (49-Down) wasn’t particularly restrictive. For me, the hardest corners to construct, actually, are the ones with the most options; even if I come up with what I feel like is a good corner, I will always be questioning myself, “Couldn’t this be better with these letters, though?” Sometimes I just have to cut the constructing cord and say, “OK, that’s it… I’m satisfied.”
Also, a word about cross references: I go by the credo that just because you can make a cross reference doesn’t mean you should. 36-Across and 37-Across are a prime example; they’re even next to each other in the clues, but I resisted temptation. Cross-referencing, as a solver, is a bit of a distraction if I see it too much, though it can be very elegant if the connection is very close. I cross-reference with caution.
My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is a close decision between 53-Down and 8-Across, both fascinating in their own very different ways.
As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?
As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Friday!
Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!
In my everlasting crusade to procrastinate about publishing a variety puzzle stay current in the cruciverbal arts, I have another “because reasons” freestyle puzzle on a Friday (just like this one two weeks ago or this one from a while back). This one I saw on social media three days before this post. I got that old magic feeling when I noticed it was fifteen letters long, and off I went. I had three other seeds besides 8-Down, which were 24-Across, 35-Down, and 40-Down. I did throw in a couple of mini-seeds at 32-Down and 11-Down as I was constructing along — those two were in the northeast corner, which was the section I completed last.
You might have noticed, because the perspicacity of the cruciverbal community knows no bounds, that, if an entry can be read as either a proper noun or an uncapitalized word, I will almost always clue the entry as an uncapitalized word. I usually shy away as much as possible from “either you know it or you don’t” entries for place names, people’s names, etc. because uncapitalized words almost always have more cluing options than capitalized ones. In this puzzle, however, there’s an exception; I don’t know why I clued a particular entry as a proper name, maybe because I was amazed at the tidbit that I chose to use in the clue for this entry. See if you can spot it after you’re done.
Oh, and one more anecdote about this puzzle. I showed Christine the finished grid with the entry at 8-Down. Later that night, just before bed, she asked me (highlight the blank space for what she said, as it’s kinda sorta a spoiler alert), “What was that name you showed me earlier? Wicka flicka dicka?” No bad intentions, she just honestly couldn’t remember it. We couldn’t stop laughing after that one.
My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is definitely the fact at 41-Across. I found pictures of the inside of it on a very interesting blog post of someone who lives in Guam — just search [guam (entry at 41-Across)] to check it out, as I don’t want to give it away in the name of the hyperlink.
As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?
As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Tuesday!
Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!
The structure for this puzzle is a little unusual for me, because I don’t usually like to build sections like those semi-closed-off areas in the northwest and southeast. (As I recall, I’ve only done something like that a couple of times on this site.) Those sections are a little more wide-open than you usually see — usually, the “choke point” of the closed-off section is 3 letters wide, but this time it’s 4 letters wide (at 24-Across and 44-Across, in this puzzle). The reason it’s 4 letters wide is because I really wanted the nice interlock between 3-Down/27-Across and 37-Across/23-Down, and the seed at 3-Down is 11 letters long. If I’d put the answer at 3-Down in the third column, that would have forced me to put a three-block bar in rows 4 and 12, which would have forced a pair of three stacking three-letter answers in the northeast and southwest. (I prefer not to have stacks of two or more threes in the corners.) Thus, 3-Down is in the 4th column, which forced me to keep those corners at least four squares wide.
I often talk about my seed list for answers, but I also have a seed list for clues. 23-Down was in the seed clue list, so I was glad to get that clue-answer pair out there.
You can probably guess what novel inspired the entry at 37-Across, but I won’t give it away here… no spoilers!
My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is, by far, the tidbit at 1-Down. I could have gone in many different directions with that clue, of course, but that fact in the clue was too good to pass up. Wow.
As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?
As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Friday!
Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!
Surprise! I decided to mix it up a little bit and include a themed crossword for the first time on this site. I mentioned in my last post that the freestyle puzzle I constructed was done entirely by hand; I continued in that vein for this one. This was also entirely constructed by hand.
However, instead of talking about the puzzle in this post, I’d like to put in my two cents about the discussion generated from the April 14, 2015, New York Times puzzle. If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly familiar with it by now. If you don’t know about it, every letter in that whole 15×15 puzzle grid by Bruce Haight is one of eight different letters: AEIGHRST (including the central revealer, EIGHT). The grid was riddled with entries that are widely considered awkward, if not straight-up crosswordese.
The discussion, thus, gravitated toward two main opposing sides: (a) It’s All About The Fill™, or (b) the constructor should be given some leeway in terms of questionable fill if the thematic concept requires it and is pushing the bounds of creativity. (Both of these viewpoints are perfectly valid and sane points of view!) For some reason, we as a society like to make things either black or white; if you’re not with one side, you’re with the other, and there is very little gray area, very little room for discussion in the middle. It seemed like the solvers either loved the puzzle because they loved the idea of every word within an eight-letter set, or they hated the puzzle because of the many cringe-inducing entries.
As you know if you’ve visited this site before, you know that I am all about that fill (‘bout that fill, no clutter) in my freestyle puzzles. I have no tolerance for partial phrases, plural abbreviations, and other such entries in my constructions – they aren’t even in my word list. Thus, it may surprise you to learn that I am not in the camp that this puzzle had too many bad entries to be publishable in such a wide-reaching venue as the New York Times.
For starters, I was curious, so I set out to see if I could, for lack of a better way to put it, do better. I used the same constraints – same eight letters, same number of words and black squares. The only difference is that my word list has no partial phrases, no plural abbreviations, and not that much crosswordese, so I wasn’t using any of that. After quite a few hours of trying… frankly, I couldn’t do better than the grid in the New York Times. In the interest of full disclosure, I was going to post that puzzle alongside the one I already made for today. However, since I couldn’t get the fill close to a quality that I would consider to publish on my site, I decided not to go through with it. I’m not saying that if I can’t do better, no one can, but my one-person effort was enough to prove to myself that it would be a very difficult task to complete a “clean” grid under those constraints.
But, but, but: does that mean that, if it’s difficult or impossible to execute a good puzzle idea with squeaky-clean, or reasonably clean, fill, that the idea should be abandoned or relegated to a site with less of an audience? The very fact that there’s an argument about this issue means that not everybody will think an idea, or its execution, is good… and not everybody will think an idea, or its execution, is bad. Some people think that some bad fill is completely unforgivable no matter how good the idea is. Some people think that a good puzzle idea is worth a bit of detritus in the fill. Is it the editor’s job to cull only the puzzles from the submission pile that will please everyone all the time (as if that were even possible)? Is it the editor’s job to print puzzles that will always cater to one set of tastes or another? If it were either of those things, no editor would last too long. When you cater to such a wide audience as the set of New York Times crossword puzzle solvers is, should you play it safe? The puzzle would get boring if you do. Is it even possible to play it safe to such a wide and varied audience? Of course not.
So where do you draw the line between what is publishable and what isn’t? What I find disappointing (but not shocking) is that there is a not insignificant number of crossword puzzle solvers and constructors – especially some (but not all) of those with the loudest voices in the critics’ community and some who follow them – who find a definite place to draw this line, and even be confrontational about where they draw this line. (Of course, it’s well known that the most confrontational and controversial public voice is going to be the one that gets the biggest audience… that’s just the way it goes.) This is disappointing to me because, as a group, crossword people are the most open-minded people, the people most amenable to diversity of creative expression and interpretation of ideas, of any set of people that I know. This theoretical line shouldn’t be a razor-thin jet-black line drawn in permanent ink; I thought the only black-and-white lines in this art form were within the crossword grid. It shouldn’t even be a line; the gray area is so diffuse that I couldn’t even begin to tell where it starts and ends.
Do I think there were way, way too many bad entries in this puzzle grid? Yes, of course I do. Do I think that the creative idea of this puzzle justified the huge pile of bad fill in the grid? No, of course I don’t. There were lots of demerits, and I found myself cringing quite often solving that puzzle. I frankly didn’t enjoy the solve at all because of those bad entries. But do I think that this puzzle absolutely, positively should have been passed over for this venue because I didn’t enjoy solving it? No! Just because I didn’t enjoy the solve, just because I think that it had too much bad fill for my tastes, doesn’t mean that it’s an awful puzzle; I’m not so egotistical to think that my standards are the standards by which a puzzle should be judged for publishing. Just because I didn’t enjoy the solve doesn’t mean that nobody else who solves the puzzles in this venue will; many people did enjoy it. If I hate eating tuna tartare because I don’t like some of the ingredients, does that mean that I should throw a fit, say that it’s the worst food ever, and opine that I think that it shouldn’t be served at my favorite restaurant, even if I know that a lot of other people who eat there enjoy it? If I were the Michelin-star chef who made the dish, and I heard this complaining, should I stop serving it on my menu because I’m afraid that some people aren’t going to like the way it tastes?
I can come at this issue not only from a solver’s perspective but also a constructor’s view. Case in point: I constructed a puzzle a while ago that found a home here. I’ll be honest: I don’t think that I, personally, would enjoy solving this if I weren’t the constructor. Ironic, right? When I constructed the puzzle, I knew that some people would definitely not like it; I also knew that some people would definitely really like it. Did I sit on it because it was a “stunt”? No. Did I sit on it because I was afraid of the segment of the solving population that I knew wasn’t going to like it? No. Conversely, did I send it out because I wanted to be a showoff? No! Just like solvers like to solve puzzles after they’re constructed, constructors like to solve puzzles within puzzles as they’re being constructed. “How can I work within my constraints to complete this grid with these extreme self-imposed restrictions? And will these constraints be so ridiculous that no solver could ever like this?”
Even though it didn’t sit well with some solvers, including me, it was still clearly enjoyed by many, and it carved out another little niche within the domain of the cruciverbal arts. Those can’t be bad things, can they?
By Tim Croce ||| Original freestyle crossword puzzles on Tuesdays at 6pm Eastern ||| Original puzzles (sometimes more freestyles, sometimes variety puzzles or even themed puzzles) on Fridays at 6pm Eastern
Club 72 