Hi, I'm David and I make crosswords. You may have seen my puzzles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, and the Universal Crossword.
Full of Chemicals
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Every circle in this puzzle contains a two-letter atomic symbol for a unique element.
Back on the big-center train. This puzzle was full of coincidences. The original version had black squares on the first letter of 51-Down and the last letter of 55-Down. After filling most of the center, I realized that these could be removed, forming a stack of five long entries going vertically, but a stack of seven long entries going horizontally. Then as I was cluing, I realized that 50-Down and 55-Across both feature in the play "Knickerbocker Holiday," which is as specific as it is random. For those of you who don't already know all of the characters and songs from 1930's Broadway plays (and I'm sure there are at least tens of you) I've added extra hints in those clues. There's a fair amount of these hints throughout the puzzle because I want things to be as fair as possible for a puzzle this wide-open. Even so, I'd call this a "very hard" puzzle, so proceed with caution, but listen to the void if it calls to you.
This themeless was inspired by Diana Sessions, a Pre-Shortzian constructor who was making puzzles with centers like this as early as the 1950's. I have no idea how you could even start to go about this back then; I used Crossfire and it still took ages and a lot of manual reworking to achieve anything like it. Just a couple of stats for the puzzle before we begin. It has 126 words, but only 52 black squares, thanks to the fact that the open center takes up so much space that you need minimal blocks to make the edges fillable. It's also finally a big-center themeless with rotational symmetry. Enjoy!
We've finally breached the 6.00 average word length mark! And in a big way, with a massive 25x25 asymmetrical themeless. This puzzle was inspired by the work I did on Crosscord's Freehand Grid , which was a massive, completely asymmetrical crossword made without constructing software. While the massive open center of this puzzle started with Crossfire, it was mainly used to create a small central section that I expanded outwards myself. 74-, 90-, 97-, and 99-Across, 32-, 36-, 65-, and 75-Down were all added manually, and half of those weren't even in my wordlist.
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