Here’s an announcement about next week’s puzzle: It wasn’t me! The April 23 crossword was written by a pair of guest constructors that really impressed me when they showed me their work, and I asked them if they’d like to take my spot for a day. I think you’ll like what they did. My next puzzle will publish on April 30.
It’s not often that I’ll write a puzzle where the theme answers run down rather than across, but the title “From Top to Bottom” gave me a good reason to do that. I took the first letters (the top ones) of 10 thematic Down words or phrases and moved them to the bottom, creating truly bizarre answers. Moving from left to right in the grid: Prime 3d Puzzle
These aren’t just any random transformations. The starting note says that “10 letters in this puzzle, read left to right, spell out a word whose clue is this puzzle’s title.” Take the 10 starting letters that moved to the bottom, read them left to right in the grid, and they spell out COMPLETELY — a one-word term that means “from top to bottom.”
I’ve written two crosswords of this type that I can recall. The first one was “Back to Square One” from May 2018 which did the opposite trick of moving the last letters of phrases back to the beginning. The second one was “Jumping to Conclusions” from May 2022 which has the same pattern as in today’s puzzle, just with a different final meta-like answer.
One thing I forgot about those previous two puzzles is how tough it can be to find viable phrases that can be reasonably clued when you shift a letter. Ninety-five percent of the time the transformation will just produce a string of gibberish. A related thing that I keep forgetting is that the answers I pick for this kind of theme invariably end up being so strange that I’m never sure how people will react to them. I think of them as absurdly amusing, but I can understand if they’re too odd for others’ tastes. They’re certainly tougher to uncover than your standard punny theme answer. Still, as my friend and former crossword blogger Jim Quinlan once said when he reviewed one of my puzzles, “If you’re gonna go wacky, go big or go home.”
Some other answers and clues:
3d Puzzle Harry Potter Hogwarts Once again, here’s a reminder that next week’s puzzle is brought to you by a couple of guests. I hope you enjoy it and I’ll include a Q&A with the constructors so you can learn more about them.