I Wanna Rock

 Sometimes a puzzle is made with a lot of love and care over the course of several weeks. Sometimes you go to a museum, have a silly theme idea, and churn out a puzzle in a few hours. Last week's Where There Never Was a Puzzle is the former, and if you haven't yet done it, please go solve it! This puzzle, as you might have guessed, is the latter (and I'm really hoping it doesn't overshadow the last puzzle, but I can be terribly impatient when it comes to posting puzzles).

The reason that this became a blog puzzle is that, after I had finalized my theme set, I discovered that two of my theme entries appeared in a 2003 New York Sun puzzle. I'd definitely never seen the 2003 puzzle before starting this one, and I looked at it just long enough to verify that it did in fact use those two theme entries (and didn't use my other two!), so I promise this was just a case of there only being so many possible 15-letter entries that fit the theme. Still, given that, it didn't seem right to try to submit this theme to any publication, and I was having enough fun with it that I didn't want to scrap it entirely, so I decided to make it a quick little blog puzzle with some fun and silly clues.

Thanks, as usual, to my sister for a quick test solve.

Puz for the bots | Direct Crosshare link

Where There Never Was A Puzzle (collab with Norah Sharpe)

Hey, remember that 15x themed puzzle I promised? It's here! And it's another collab with Very Good Crossword Person Norah Sharpe.

Stephen Sondheim was hugely influential in the theater world--and, it turns out, the cryptic crossword world (see Ben Zimmer's article). Therefore, it's no surprise this isn't the first tribute puzzle (see puzzles by Francis Heaney, Brian Cimmet, No-Feet McGee, and Andrew Ries), but as a musical geek and a proponent of the "holy shit! two cakes!" school of creativity, I had to have a go at it. The news of his death (and the realization that our revealer was 15 letters long) hit shortly before I had a long car ride and little to do but ponder theme ideas. That weekend, Norah mentioned listening to Sondheim while making the last of her NaCroWriMo puzzles (which you should 100% check out--I'm still impressed), and since our last collaboration went so well, we decided to work together on this one. Overall, we tried to make the puzzle a love letter to Sondheim and to musical theater in general. Enjoy!

From Norah:

Look we made a puzzle! Where there never was a puzzle! Rose and I started talking about this project just as I was wrapping up my NaCroWriMo series. (Yes, I might have just broken my promise not to touch crossfire on day one...) Because this puzzle was meant as a timely homage to someone whose work has touched so many, I'm so grateful to Rose for being patient with me while I got my groove back. I love Rose's fresh and fun take on cluing, and there's no one else I could have done this with. This is our second collab (see Eleven here), but definitely not our last!

Thanks to Will for providing valuable feedback when test solving that definitely made this a better puzzle.

Puz for the bots | Direct Crosshare link

No Bears

 I'm back--and not too long after the last puzzle! I usually am a slow-ish constructor, but I've been on a bit of a kick lately, so I have a proper 11x midi (a themed one, even!), and I may even be back soon-ish with a full-sized grid (but that one's still very much in progress, so don't hold your breath).

This puzzle was made as an entry to the Crosshare Discord's midi challenge, which is a soon to be monthly event where various constructors make 11x midis based on a given prompt. This month's prompt is the revealer in this puzzle, since I heard it and quickly had a somewhat silly theme concept. Said concept then went through several iterations to find one that works within an 11x  (since it turns out that constructing a traditionally themed 11x with a 10-letter revealer is not so easy), and in some ways this is more a proof of concept than anything. Mostly, I tried to focus on what makes a midi puzzle fun and packed the fill and especially the clues with things I like (TTRPGs! Sports anime! Taylor Swift! American Girl!), along with some fun wordplay.

Thanks to my sister, as usual, for test solving. Some spoiler-y construction and etymology talk below the puzzle.

Puz file for the bot | Direct Crosshare link

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Okay, spoilers from this point on. Don't say I didn't warn you.

One etymology "fun fact" that I see around the Internet is that the Arctic and Antarctica are derived from the Latin or Greek for "the one with bears" and "the one without bears". This, like many etymology fun facts, is only sort of true. It's true that these names originally stem from the Greek arktos meaning bear, but that's only because it's the origin of the Greek word arktikos for north, since the Ursa Major (or Great Bear) constellation is in the north, which then became the Latin arcticus and got combined with the prefix ant- to denote a place very far south. So really Antarctica is just the place in the opposite direction from Ursa Major, and it's just serendipitous that it is also the pole with no bears, but the etymology did make for a fun little theme.

My initial thought for this theme was to play more on the "opposite of bear" etymology and take phrases like BLACK COFFEE or POLAR OPPOSITES and switch the first word to its opposite to get themers like WHITE COFFEE clued in silly ways. This, however, posed two problems. First, this was absolutely not doable in an 11x, and the challenge is exclusively for 11x puzzles. I considered releasing two versions of this puzzle, one this midi version and another a 15x puzzle using my initial theme, until I ran into the second problem. It turns out there aren't that many bears that have opposites. BLACK to WHITE was an easy change, but what's the opposite of POLAR? Or BROWN? And what other bears even have good enough set phrases that I can play on them?

I wouldn't be surprised if a more skilled constructor could make a more clever version of the "no bears" concept (in 15x form and all!). Maybe I'll even become that more skilled constructor someday. As is, I hope that you found this version fun!