Double Speak

 Welcome back to another year of A Crossword Rose, where legally, all I can say about this puzzle is that this blog officially does not advocate any real life crimes, but cool heist teams are pretty sweet. This is actually my second puzzle posted this year. The first was a collab with Dob on the Crossweird site, which you should definitely do if you haven't done it yet! I think it's my favorite theme I've ever made.

Today's puzzle is an entry to this month's Crosshare midi contest, which had a prompt that lent itself nicely to this 2-entry theme set. As is so often the way, I set out to clue this at an easy level, and then... wound up not doing that. So expect the typical Rose puzzle fare: some footholds but also a bit of trickier wordplay, some musical theater, some silly meme-ish clues, and one possibly unfair (but hopefully not too unfair) Lord of the Rings related crossing. Thanks to my sister for testing, and enjoy!

Puz file | Direct Crosshare link

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!

Mini 3

 This is called Mini 3, despite being the first mini on this blog, since I previously posted 2 minis on Crosshare only (one of which I think is pretty great). It is also arguably not a mini, since I know 9x puzzles are often big enough to count as midis, but since I currently have no interest in making anything smaller than 7x and limited interest in making anything smaller than 9x, these count as minis here. Frankly, I don't plan to post a ton of them, since I feel like I'm now at the point where making 15x (or at least 11x) puzzles is better practice, but sometimes you got to do something small and quick, you know?

Anyways, this time, my reason for doing something small and quick is that I have, once again, redone my word list set up, which I'm learning is a never-ending task. This is equal parts fascinating and frustrating for me, given that most of my actual work involves cleaning and processing a lot of language data, but I'm hoping my current efforts will pay out in future puzzles (and am very happy to share my work with other constructors). Beyond that, the seeds here should be fairly obvious once I tell you that my seed list is heavily focused on both Internet culture and female singer-songwriters (and I've had the clue for 6A rattling around in my head for a bit).

Thanks to my sister for test solving. If you have any thoughts on the puzzle (or on word lists), hit me up!

Puz file for bot friends | Direct Crosshare link

Eleven (collab with Norah Sharpe)

Here's a new puzzle, and this time, it's a collab with Norah Sharpe, who is an excellent constructor and also probably one of the most supportive people on the crossword Internet. She's doing NaCroWriMo, a challenge where you try to construct one puzzle per day in November (which wow), which was a great impetus to finish up this collab. Kudos to Norah for finding an excellent grid spanner (and general grid set up) based on one of my dumb tweets, and I think the resulting puzzle is pretty great!

From Norah:

We're calling this "Eleven" because it's #11 in my NaCroWriMo series (see more here). Rose is another one of those folks that you know is gonna be great right from the jump. After I solved her demi with Brooke (on Ada's site here), I knew I wanted to collab. And the opportunity presented itself just a few days later by way of this totally-spoilery tweet, which as soon as I saw I sent Rose a message and said, "how about a 15x themeless banger?" because of course I did. I took a few runs at a grid until we found one we both liked enough, and this is it. I love Rose's fresh and fun cluing style, and I hope you have as much fun solving as we did making it. 💜

Puz file for our bot friends (and humans too) | Direct crosshare link

Halloween Themeless

Happy (almost) Halloween! Have a new puzzle... and a new blog! All of the crossword cool kids seem to have them, so I figured I was due for a proper blog to post my puzzles. I'm not planning to post on any regular schedule, but definitely stay tuned for more puzzles!

This puzzle came from two things. First, one thing I've really found I like is puzzles that look and play more or less like themeless puzzles but have a lot of entries or clues related to a semi-theme. Halloween is fun and gives me plenty to work with, so I figured I'd do something seasonal. Second, I've been trying to learn how to fill a themeless grid, since I don't really have much experience working with 15x themelesses. I think I made some tradeoffs here for the sake of the semi-theme that I might not make elsewhere, but I'm pretty happy with the end result, and it's definitely a learning process. (Maybe next time I'll go wild and learn what a stack is.)

On a technical note, I'm planning to continue using Crosshare to host and embed the actual puzzles, which means that puz and PDF options are built into the applet. (Edit: here's a direct puz link for those of you who don't want to deal with the applet, because, say, you're a bot. We love our bots here.) Let me know if anything doesn't work or if there's a good reason for me to switch software. In general, if you have any comments about the applet, the puzzle, or just overall crossword stuff, feel free to contact me via Twitter, Discord, or the comments here. Thanks to Norah and my sister for test solving, and enjoy!