puzzle 182: "group shot (w/ matthew stock)"

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freestyle collaboration with matthew stock to go along with our puzzle in this weekend's wall street journal. lots of fun stuff in both puzzles, and i hope you enjoy these puzzles as much as i enjoyed working with matthew on these.

about this puzzle, matthew notes:

chris’ blog was one of the first indie puzzle sites i discovered, so it’s great to make a co-constructing appearance here with this themeless! we started this one off with 32-across as a seed we had both been thinking about using independently, and i think we managed to build out a good bit of fun from there. i especially enjoy chris’ pair of entries he stacked at 16-across and 18-across, and my favorite clue-answer combo is 20-down. hope you enjoy! 

in the same vein, i love the sw corner (especially 49- and 55-across), which is matthew's; i'm pretty sure he's also responsible for most / all of the good clues here.

in other puzzling news, i also collaborated with rachel fabi on the fireball puzzle from earlier this week. if you're a subscriber, i hope you enjoyed it; rachel and i certainly had a lot of fun making it, and we both like how it ended up.

puzzle 181: "taco grande"

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many thanks to quiara vasquez for testing and titling this puzzle, whose theme was shamelessly stolen from chris king.

puzzle 180: "do you remember (guest puzzle by ricky cruz)"

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guest puzzle from ricky cruz, who i collaborated with on a fun themeless last week. ricky says "chris wanted me to write some notes for the blog post, but in a hilarious turn of events, i did not remember. enjoy the puzzle." 

puzzle 179: "yahtzee"

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fun fact: by file name, this is now the alphabetically last puzzle in my folder of blog puzzles; as always, enjoy!

puzzle 178: "fishers of men"

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timely mini puzzle whose theme was lucky enough to work out symmetrically. first time i've had the inspiration to make a puzzle in quite some time, but i like it, and (fingers crossed) this will lead to me making more soon.

but yeah, sorry for not having a puzzle in a bit; i just haven't had any energy or motivation to do crosswords (or, for that matter, anything, really) in the last few weeks. still don't have much, really, but i made this, so hopefully that's a good omen. and i also got around to going through old files [aka looking at puzzles that i got rejection emails from] and managed to find some old puzzles i honestly forgot i made, so i guess i have a bit of a backlog now? at least i have more puzzles to put out without going a month between them.

[edited to add: also i guess i passed the three year anniversary sometime since the last puzzle?]

puzzle 177: "wap (guest puzzle by ada nicolle)"

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guest puzzle by ada nicolle, who's dropped a lot of great freestyles on her site recently and still has a puzzle pack available for a charity donation; see details at her site. also, lollapuzzoola tomorrow; i'm signed up for the downs only division, and haven't practiced that much, so we'll see how it goes. but it'll be fun no matter what happens.

otherwise, apologies for not having a puzzle in a bit; didn't have anything finished last weekend, but ada was nice enough to offer this puzzle. we were discussing possible revisions to this monday and basically had this finished when the derecho hit, and i ended up losing power for three days. all things considered, i'm fine; there's a lot of people around here that won't get power back for much longer, to say nothing of all the property damage. gonna try to do a crossword twitch stream some time next week to raise some money for this; details to come soon.

puzzle 176: "chekhov's gin (freestyle 123)"

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this puzzle started with the upper left; i thought about having the two nine letter entries there start and end the grid, but the letter patterns looked nice enough that i figured i'd try stacking them. got lucky in that not only did it work out, but i was able to get a third entry in there to complete the themed stack. unrelatedly: the clue at 8-down works as both a straight clue and a cryptic clue.

last weekend's boswords tournament went well; i finished fifth overall, behind four people that i expected to finish behind. many congrats to paolo pasco for winning; we'll see if he repeats in two weeks at lollapuzzoola, where i might be solving downs only (gulp). in any case, you should sign up for lolla and get the boswords puzzles if you haven't already.