NY Times Crossword Puzzle

The crossword puzzle in today's NY Times is one that I constructed. For a review of the puzzle click here (the naughty sub-theme discussed, was not intentional, unfortunately). It is part of my continued effort to become a well-known, established crossword puzzle maker. I don't have any on the docket to be published, but I have 3 submitted to the NY Times and 1 to the LA Times. I really like 2 of them, 2 of them I like less so.

I also have a handful of puzzles ready to be submitted after I hear about the other ones. A few of them I think are really good. I decided to be a bit more judicious about my selection of which puzzles I submit, especially to the NY Times. Before I took a bit of a machine gun approach, spray enough bullets and something will be hit. It was fairly effective as out of 1o or so submissions I had 3 published, but it leads to a lot of rejections and is just generally inefficient. Now, I'm going more with the sniper rifle (I just finished the excellent Iraq war memoir "Joker One", which explains the gun metaphors). I am only going to submit the puzzles I really I like and I think have a good chance of being published. The main drawback is that what I think is good and what an editor thinks is good are not always the same. Still, we'll see how my new strategy goes. I still really enjoy making crosswords puzzles, just for the sake of making of them, so I always have that to fall back on.