"What's the clue?"

"Um, I don't know yet."

KC gave me a book about the history of crosswords. I always notice the names of puzzle designers, specifically so I can curse them while solving. "Oh, yes, very goddamned clever, Trip Payne. I'm on to you now." or "Come on, AJ Santora. That's just weak." It was amusing me to see all these names I recognised.

The book had a chapter on building your own puzzles, so I've been trying that. It's a LOT harder than you might think. The goal is an open puzzle, with as few black squares as possible. It has to be symmetrical too, of course, and that's really where my brain starts to hurt.

I keep ending up with these eleven-letter monstrosities. Those are relatively easy to fill, but then coming up with everything around them that also has to make some sort of sense is tricky. So I'll break the 11-letter space into two words, but then when I go to make it symmetrical, I'll discover that I already have an 11-letter word in the corresponding space that I really like. I used the word triceratops! That's awesome! I can't change the whole grid, because where would I put the triceratops?

Basically, I'm trying to do this from too many angles at once. I think there's a puzzlebook out in my car. I should take all those "easy" puzzles that I skipped past and use them as grids for my own words. That's seeming like a much more sane starting point for this than just a blank sheet of graph paper.


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