A tenth puzzle! A third month! I guess we’re still doing these then, and hopefully those of you still reading these messages and solving these puzzles (or those of you stumbling upon them for the first time) are picking up what I’m proverbially throwing down. Last week I spoke a bit about my goals and sense of style, but I this week I wanted to elaborate on why I call them “sneaky.” I like for each of my clues, where possible, to surprise in at least the wordplay or the definition, if not both. The whole surface needs to be satisfying, and ideally the fill should be as well, but I don’t personally get much mileage out of obvious clues. The National Puzzle League goes so far as to label one type of their poetic wordplay as FWNFR: Flats We Never Finished Reading. If I can fully grok the wordplay or definition right off the bat, the surface has to be sublime to salvage things for me, and because writing the sublime is difficult, I personally aim for being sneaky instead. Of course, the constructor’s curse is that once you know that about me, it may be easier for you to expect the unexpected and dismiss the more obvious choices, and so I imagine that at some point, we’ll psychically re-enact that famous Princess Bride scene in which I know that you know that I know this. And maybe that, right there, is at heart what I’m going for.
At any rate, enough talking, go see for yourself, either at Crosshare or with the PDF below. My thanks as always to those trusted test solvers who help me talk through the trickiness: this week (as it is many weeks), that’s skaldskaparmal and juff.
The Crossword Scholar 