puzzle 97: "seven and seven (freestyle 53)"

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had some fun making some giant corners with this, though there's also the struggle of finding corners that work opposite the ones you built the grid around. still, lots of sevens here, and hopefully you enjoy a few (or seven) of them. there's quite a few that i like, and a handful of pairs that i find amusing, but i don't want to spoil anything.

puzzle 96: "winding numbers"

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special solving instructions that are very important: some squares in this grid will be filled with different letters in the across and down directions. when read in the appropriate order, the across letters will spell out an apt shape, as will the down letters. i strongly advocate printing this puzzle out and solving it on paper; the puz file works, but be aware that it is programmed to accept the across answers only, and not the down answers, so it'll be harder to keep track of things, etc.

with that warning out of the way, i'd like to thank everybody who tested this puzzle. as i suspected, it had the potential to be a bit buggy, and indeed there were a few accidental traps due to the possibility of multiple answers. thanks to the test solvers, i cleared some up, but any remaining traps remain accidental, and are all my fault anyhow. but hopefully once you get to the end it's clear which squares are (or are not) part of this puzzle's theme.

otherwise: if it helps, this puzzle was made for the university of iowa's math department newsletter (which, for the first time in over three years, is not run by yrs truly).

puzzle 95: "time out (freestyle 98)"

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not much to say about this one, other than that i had to include the relevant quote from rex parker after it showed up in the nyt crossword recently. to be fair, the puzzle was constructed and (mostly) clued before that happened; just one of those weird coincidences. still, the quote was too good not to use.

puzzle 94: "making up ground"

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yet another puzzle inspired by recent(ish) pop culture, though admittedly i haven't seen the series in question yet. not that that will ever stop me from these sorts of puzzles. and, though it doesn't look it, it's certainly got one of the higher average word lengths i've had in awhile. part of that is the fact that only two answers ended up with three letters, and part of that is the theme; still, pleased to work in a few interesting bits of fill, both short and long.

in other crossword news: i recently wrote a detailed description of how i made one of my old puzzles (specifically, this one, in case you want to solve it first, since the description is naturally full of spoilers). i can't claim to speak for all constructors, but i think it's a nice look behind the curtain, especially for newer constructors, and the advice there should hopefully be of use.

also, crossword tournaments are coming up soon: acpt, of course, but the indie 500 and boswords have recently announced their dates as well, with registration to come soon. for various reasons, i almost certainly won't be at acpt this year, but i'd love to have a presence via puzzles. and i'd love to have these puzzles be collaborations—if you have an idea you'd love to work on, hit me up.