The Theme

SHORTZ: When I first saw the theme of this puzzle, honestly, I wasn’t sure it was my cup of tea. But I’m liking it better now that I’ve seen the clues that go with it.

FAGLIANO: Yeah, what I think is done well in the theme is the parallelism. The synonyms are all placed as the last words, which allows the solver to have some expectation — O.K., the next theme answer is going to involve some synonym of “song” at the end and another word at the beginning.

Another asset of the theme is that the dictionary meaning of each phrase is pretty far from how it’s clued. For example, TENURE TRACK has nothing to do with a song, which is good.

SHORTZ: In an ideal puzzle, all the key words in the answer are not referred to in the clue. Here, PUZZLE PIECE — clued as “crossword enthusiast’s favorite song” — is still about a PUZZLE, although it’s changed a bit from a jigsaw puzzle, so there’s a little twist there. CALL NUMBER is maybe my favorite theme example, because both key words in the answer are used playfully in the clue: “telemarketer’s favorite song.”

The Grid Design

SHORTZ: So, this grid (designed around the puzzle’s themed answers) has 76 words. The maximum we allow typically in weekday crosswords is 78. It’s nice that the word count here is two under our maximum, which means the answers average a little longer than usual. Something else I like about the grid: It has great flow. No corner or section is isolated from the rest, hanging on by a single square, say. Once you start solving, you can keep moving around the grid. If you get stuck, there are several ways to get unstuck.

The Fill

SHORTZ: If we like a theme and grid well enough, then we look at the puzzle’s fill (the words, peripheral to the theme, with which the rest of the boxes in the grid have been filled).

We ask for submissions on paper rather than by email because it’s easier for us to examine the whole grid at once, and to mark up the manuscript with pluses, minuses and other comments.