Tuff Crosswords

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!

You can probably see that I've been tweaking the 132-word Sunday themeless grid to get lower and lower word counts. This one's got 124, and is probably harder than the other ones, but it's still shaped like the cool S. It's still got an average word length of under 6, but now it's JUST under: 5.98. Also please ignore the cheater squares in the top-right and bottom-left corners; they're load-bearing. Next time I do a Sunday themeless, I'm probably going to try the same grid but without those, and honestly I'm a bit scared.

Another 21x21 themeless! This one has 128 words compared to 132 in the last one, so that word count is coming down. I built this one from the middle out, finding a set of words between 41-Across and 79-Across that I liked and then filling in the gaps until the grid was split into a top half and a bottom half. This one ended up with quite a lot of Spanish in it, with some vocab and phrases but also place names. Enjoy!