Twelfth Man Puzzle

This blog is barely alive, but it's alive -- turns out having a kid really cuts into one's free time when it comes to things like blogging about crossword puzzles and Scrabble.  Who would have ever imagined?  If only while my wife was pregnant other couples with kids would have warned us about how time consuming having a child would be -- if only they would have said things like "You have no idea!" and "Your life is going to change so much!" -- I could've been more prepared.  Alas.

But I have occasion for this entry because a puzzle of mine will appear in tomorrow's NY Times.  I believe this is my seventh in NYT.  (Spoiler alert) It's a rebus puzzle in which there are 12 squares with the entire word MAN as the correct fill, and then the revealer is "TWELFTH[MAN]".  It's already available online (with a subscription, of course) and has been reviewed by Rex Parker here.  He seems to like it for the most part, I think.  He said it was too pop culture-y, which it might be, but there are two main reason for this:

1) My hand was completely forced in a section that required me to use SAMMI (Sammi "Sweatheart" of "Jersey Shore", whom I only know from Googling "Sammi" and was happy to find as I do know "Jersey Shore" was/is huge, so its cast is fair game as fill) and WINGO (Trey Wingo an ESPN analyst).  I couldn't see any acceptable way to avoid using both of these barely crossworthy, pop-culture people, without completely dismantling the basic structure of the puzzle which I didn't want to do, because I liked the basic structure of the puzzle.

2) I originally wrote this puzzle without the intent of submitting it anywhere, so I wasn't trying to make it broad and balanced, but rather specific to my interests.  It was going to be a sports-themed puzzle that I was going to post on my own puzzle website that didn't exist at the time and still doesn't.  That's why the first long answer is ELI[MAN]NING, a football player.  But then I got rolling on it, liked the way I was able to cram in so many MANs without forcing things too much, and decided the puzzle was worthy of NYT submission.

A few other things about his puzzle.

It was inspired by the Seahawks' upset win over the Saints in the playoffs two years ago.  I was living in Australia at time, and they would show American football live on regular TV at like 4 a.m. Monday morning.  Being the NFL addict I am (especially with the Seahawks, I was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington*) I used to wake up early and watch all the games (much to my wife's dismay -- we were renting a studio), so I was intently watching Seahawks vs. Saints.  Seattle likes to tout its 12th Man (which they have call the 12th Fan on some merchandise for legal reasons, despite the fact 12th Fan makes no sense whatsoever, because Texas A & M has some sort of copyright on 12th Man), and it gave me the idea for a 12th Man rebus puzzle.

I originally had the theme answer [MAN]SSIERE in the puzzle, but Will made me cut it, because he thought an answer based on a gag in a single "Seinfeld" episode wasn't very sporting to the solver (given Rex's critique, I guess he was right).

I have no idea who Armando Iannucci is.  I tried cluing AR[MAN]DO through a "Planet of the Apes" character, which in retrospect is odd considering I've never seen a "Planet of the Apes" movie.  I just assumed Armando was a somewhat main character because he was portrayed by Ricardo Montalban, a name actor.

I fought off the urge to use [MAN]ON[MAN], although it would've been very apropos given the election results of gay marriage referendums in Washington, Maryland, and Maine (which were all good news to me). 

That's it.  Hopefully I will have more puzzles published in the somewhat near future.  I don't have anything on the docket, but I've submitted one recently and have a plethora more ready to go, just waiting to be submitted if I would ever just do it.  As it turns out, I like creating a lot more than I like submitting.






*Technically I was raised in an area of unincorporated Pierce County, Washington which is now a city called University Place.  It's most famous residents include Gary Larson (through whom I tried to clue GARY, but Will changed it), Pat Tillman, and the basketball-playing Isaiah Thomas (not to be confused with the basketball-playing Isiah Thomas).

My First Entry In Months

The occasion is that I came across a copy of "Will Shortz Picks His Favorite Puzzles" while wasting time in a book store this afternoon, and I have two puzzles in it. For each puzzle Will says a little blurb, and for my first puzzle (chronologically), he says,

Here's a fun subject for a puzzle, and there is a little surprise at 41-Across. To date, Damon has had six crosswords published in The Times, two of which are in this book. Not a bad average!

Pretty cool. But it's a good thing he didn't state my acceptance / submission average, that one's not so great.

Actually, I knew that I had two puzzles in this book a while ago. Will mentioned it in an email while telling me a puzzle of mine was accepted (as did his helper Paula Gamache in an email telling me a puzzle of mine was rejected, I liked the first email better). The puzzle hasn't appeared yet, but I suspect it will soon. You never know though, sometimes they appear faster than other times.

My new goal is get a themeless puzzle accepted. I've submitted a few, but they've been no-gos. Looking back over them, I see why. I often get caught up in the moment constructing and convince myself that bad fill isn't so bad (like TOKENED). I think I can eliminate this with some more practice, so my new strategy is to make a bunch -- five or so, wait a little while, and then go back over them later and see if any of them are worth submitting.

We'll see how it goes.