Pretty pleased with how this one turned out, to be honest. The main idea is nothing earth-shattering -- spell-out-a-letter puzzles have been before; one was published in the NYT about a year ago by Zhouqin Burnikel (who else?) -- but I feel like I distinguished this one in a few ways. First, I made the revealer an imperative clue, which I thought was a nice touch; second, the letters in QUICKLY are "fun" (or at least Scrabbly -- the tile values in QUICKLY add to 25 points); third, there are a lot of theme answers crammed into the grid -- even though most of them are short, fitting eight into a puzzle is a tall order. So, if you judge a puzzle strictly by number of theme answers (which, of course, you should) then this one is terrific!
Because of the high theme-density, I figured there wouldn't be much room for "bonus" fill (interesting non-theme entries), so once I got the themers in place, I focused on making the grid as clean as possible, even if it meant forgoing "zippy" entries in certain places. Was I successful in this endeavor? I think I so; others will surely disagree. One thing not in my favor is that I think this puzzle is misplaced on a Tuesday -- I think it should be a Wednesday puzzle. Some of the names are more suited for a puzzle later in the week. But then again, I'm biased because I've been shooting for a Wednesday puzzle for a long time (to hit for "the cycle"), and it remains elusive -- I've had a few Tuesdays people think are too hard and a few Thursdays people think are too easy, but no Wednesday, as yet.
I suspect some solvers are going to grouse about the proper names, not all of which are super well-known (e.g., LESAGE, YOST, ABOU). I wouldn't mind them if I were solving this puzzle -- I like a lot of trivia in my puzzles -- but I know from prior feedback that many (most?) solvers feel differently. I go back and forth between strictly regulating the amount of trivia I inject into my puzzles and just owning it. At any given moment, I'm probably somewhere in the middle. My overriding philosophy now is that I'm not going to go out of my way to add proper nouns (like I used to), but I'm going to favor them over fill I personally dislike, such as partials, random Roman numerals, and uncommon variants or abbreviations.
As an example, consider the pattern Y??T that the theme answers imposed at 44-Down. There are three options -- YEST, YOST, and YURT. YURT is the best entry of the three, in my opinion, because it's a (relatively) common English word. However, YURT forces the A?R pattern at 51-Across (ABOU is literally the only thing I know of that works for ?B?U), and it forces an initial U at 49-Across, both of which are awkward given the other constraints. Getting YURT in would have required worse trade-offs, like, say, the ugly abbreviation ABR (used once in the NYT almost 20 years ago: "Like pocket dicts."). So, ruling out YURT, it comes down to YEST or YOST -- which is better? In my opinion, it's YOST and it's not particularly close. YEST is an abbreviation I cannot find anywhere. In the dictionary it tells me it's an archaic variant of YEAST, and when I Google it, it returns mostly random gibberish. YOST, on the other hand, might not be well-known to non-baseball fans, but he did lead the Royals to a World Series victory less than three years ago. And when I Google "YOST," I see a link to a real thing, an actual person. That's good. (By the way, there is another baseball YOST -- Eddie Yost -- who might have been the greatest walker in MLB history.)
Anyway, I'm talking so much about proper nouns, and the issue solvers have with this puzzle is probably going to be something else completely. That seems to be how it goes. It's always something I don't even think of. This happened to the nth degree at ACPT the week before last, where my puzzle caused much ado because some solvers interpreted it in a way I never anticipated. You can read my take on the entire weekend here. I've already been told that I underplay the chaos and frustration my puzzle caused, but that's mainly because I got tired of writing (and the post was already quite long). I'm well aware, and I even had a whole other section of the post worked out in my head about hearing solvers plead their cases to the judges, but I just ran out of steam. So it goes.
Anyway, I might hop back on and post a few more thoughts after perusing the blogosphere. If not, until next time...
