November 15, 2007
What's black and white...
Hello. I hope to have a substantial blog post up this weekend to make up for the lack of, well, much of anything here while I've been working on the first draft of my novel (about 58,000 words so far, thanks for asking). Until then, please enjoy my latest New York Sun crossword, "A Study in Scarlet". For full enjoyment, I recommend printing before solving...although, personally, I always recommend that because I don't really enjoy solving onscreen in general. (Download Across Lite to open the file if you don't have it installed already.) And as a bonus game, see if you can figure out which clue I tried to my damnedest to get Peter Gordon to change, but he didn't.
Posted by Francis at 11:34 AMOh, very cute.
Was the clue you wanted changed 42 Across? That one was a little meh to me.
Posted by: Debby at November 15, 2007 09:31 PM20-Across, because even multilingual trigram deletions are only slightly interesting?
Posted by: Dart at November 15, 2007 09:35 PMBoth of those were clues of mine that went through unchanged. I see I have very cleverly asked people to criticize my cluing! How brilliant of me. Maybe I should give away the answer before this goes any further. I wanted him to change 3-Down, because (a) I'd never heard of the usage, (b) I don't really like sports clues in general, (c) I don't like clues that require a thing like "with 'up'" at the end when it's avoidable, and (d) I liked my original clue better (which I won't mention, in case I get another chance to clue the same word sometime).
Posted by: Francis at November 15, 2007 10:38 PMOh--I read that challenge as "which clue of mine did I write in jest and then failed to convince Peter to change to something better". (For which I fear my guess was also 20A.)
But very nice execution of a clever theme.
Posted by: Lance at November 16, 2007 02:50 AMAh, see, 3 Down didn't bother me, but then again, I watch baseball on a semi-regular basis. (20 A was my second guess, by the way ...)
Posted by: Debby at November 16, 2007 09:36 AM20A is pretty loopy, but I like it...even though I sort of didn't expect it to make it through the editing process, but Peter liked it too. It certainly has never been used as a clue before, which is something Peter (and I) like to do, rather than go with a standard alliteration + translation clue (like "Man of Milan", "Sicilian sir", or "Gentleman of Genoa").
Posted by: Francis at November 16, 2007 12:01 PM