A Crossword Rows (Summer Puzzle 8, with Alex Boisvert)

 Hi all, about to head off for my little Pride trip, so I'll keep this one short, but I'm delighted to have another collab for you this week! You all surely know Alex Boisvert of Crossword Nexus fame, who is a variety puzzle whiz. He pointed out that I, of all people, should really have a Rows Garden on my blog, and I agreed! So we made one! Enjoy! There's no embed for this, but I have online solving (multiflora) and PDF options below, so use whichever you like.

Online Solver | PDF

Imagine the Pastabilities (Summer Puzzle 7, with Dob Olino)

 New collab this week, and it's with Dob Olino of Crossweird fame! Dob's a great friend, and we've been meaning to do a second collab for awhile, so I'm glad we finally were able to put something together for this blog project! Fair warning, we got pretty silly with it, so expect this to be a bit goofier than some of the other summer puzzles, but I think it's pretty fun! Also thanks to the answer to 72-Down for their special guest clue on 72-Down.

Dob says:

"I've been enjoying Rose's Summer Puzzles a lot, which Momes and I have been solving on our Crossweird Twitch channel (definitely the last shameless plug). I am always genuinely honored when Rose wants to collab with me, which we did once before on a genuinely really good blog puzzle. When I thought of this silly idea, I immediately knew Rose would be into it and all the themers came together almost immediately. It's super dumb in the most super fun way and I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for solving!"

In other A Crossword Rose news, for those of you who read last week's blog post/did last week's puzzle, please know that I finished watching the show, and now my soul has been shattered, life changed, etc. So take this as a strong endorsement to solve that puzzle and then watch the show (or just talk to me about it if you have watched it). The other Rose news is that I'll be traveling next weekend for Pride--going to try to get a puzzle up before then, but there's a small chance I'll be taking a week off.

Crosshare

Absolute Destiny Apocalypse (Summer Puzzle 6)

 A fun thing about posting a puzzle every week this summer is that this blog becomes a little bit of a record of my (not very eventful, tbh) summer. Anyways, at the end of May, I went on a little trip to Acadia National Park (which was lovely) and then sprained my ankle while hiking (which was not so lovely). This meant that I basically spent the first week of June sitting on my couch watching TV, and in particular, I spent a fair bit of time watching a certain anime, which inspired this puzzle!

Anyways, if you are familiar with the subject of this puzzle, please know that I have about 5 episodes left, I am having a GREAT time, and I have gone in spoiler-free and very much do not want to be spoiled. Also my description of it in this puzzle probably doesn't do it justice but I had to fit it into a parseable crossword clue.

Anyways, hope everyone who's been solving is having a good summer! Happy Pride! See you all again next week!

(Also, side note, unless I hear from someone that they really want the separate puz files, I'm going to start just linking the Crosshare for now! I started uploading separate puz files, because it played nicer with the Daily Crossword Links bot several years ago, but I think that's been resolved, and anyone else can download a puz directly from the Crosshare applet if you want to solve elsewhere.)

Direct Link

Take a Deep Breath (Summer Puzzle 5, with Norah Sharpe)

It's week 5, and the summer puzzles are still going strong! Today, we have another collab with friend of the blog Norah Sharpe! This puzzle was inspired by last week's Scripps National Spelling Bee, and for those of you who don't know the deep A Crossword Rose lore, I am a former spelling bee finalist! These day, I'm just a big spelling bee fan (...unless Scripps wants to hire me), but for the past few years, I've watched the bee with my friends in the Crossweird Discord server. This means that this is not my first bee-themed puzzle, and it's not even my first bee-themed collab with Norah, but I'm always happy to make another one!

Norah says:

"Watching the spelling bee with Rose has become a bit of a tradition in recent years, as has making a post-bee crossword. When I immediately noticed the crossword-friendly fact of (redacted) I said, “do you wanna make a crossword?” Rose of course said yes."

Unrelated to this puzzle, if you want more Rose crossword content, I have a collab with ACPT superstar and friend of the blog Dan Schwartz on his blog.

Puz | Crosshare

Making Things Up (Summer Puzzle 4)

 I'm back with a hopefully relatively easy one this week. This puzzle has one of those themes that you may or may not be able to see depending on your background, which I think make for fun blog puzzles but are a little too niche to play anywhere else. Could I have come up with a version of this that has more than 3 themers? Probably, but I was traveling this week, and I struggle a lot with mirror symmetry as is, so I figured I'd keep this one simple.

Crosshare | Puz

Themeless: Holy Malört (Summer Puzzle 3, with Norah Sharpe)

 It's a long weekend, so technically I am still keeping to my one puzzle per weekend schedule! I am also pleased to present the first collab of my summer puzzle project, with none other than Norah Sharpe. I'm always happy to collab with Norah, so I was delighted when she came to me with this grid. We clued it on the tough side--I expect this to play like a Boswords stormy.

Norah says:

“Four years or so ago I committed to a big blog project of my own and Rose was one of many people who stepped up to help me make it happen so donating this grid to this blog is a long overdue reciprocation. I seeded this grid with 13-A in Rose’s honor. Enjoy!”

Thanks to Will for test solving. (I'll probably be back to my test solver-less ways soon, but given the difficulty, it was really good to get another set of eyes on this one!)

Puz | Crosshare

Themeless: Best of the Year (Summer Puzzle 2)

 As I mentioned last week, I'm trying to post a puzzle every week this summer! Here's the second one. This one's a themeless. I seeded it initially with 12A (which I'm participating in this year!) and secondarily 24D, which I think are a fun pair for a themeless. To make it, I did what all good constructors do: spent several days failing to come up with a good grid, gave up, and then stole and slightly modified a Robyn Weintraub grid that filled beautifully. I also found cluing in a few days really difficult, and I think I leaned heavier on trivia clues than usual, but the puzzle is done, and I think it is still solvable!

Puz | Crosshare