Great to get freshness in the clue for RHYME, too, riffing on Prancer and Dancer but not Rudolph and Vixen. Loved the newb-accessible wordplay in punning on LOLLIPOPS. The cluing touches helped to elevate the Monday solve. It's much easier to grid around than a central 9, 11, or 13, which would force black square placements and thus take away flexibility. Colorful phrase, and its length (15) makes it a perfect middle-row themer. until I got to PRO.įantastic find in I DIDNT MEAN TO PRY. It wasn't clear to me that we were making a V.M. Only one themer uses its vowel (PRO and the O) - no PRAY, for example, which would make the theme drabber. My French friends down the street might be overinfluencing me these days. "Pru" sounding the same as PROULX? Love it. Every P+(long vowel sound) is only one syllable. Many thanks especially to Tracy Bennett over at NYT for the always kind and always helpful feedback through many previous rejections (22!) and for the suggestions that ultimately got this one accepted.Ĭonsistency. I put this one together fairly quickly from there. I'm a sucker for elegant examples of simple themes, found five long entries I liked and loved that I would get to debut a favorite author in Annie Proulx if accepted. (Only the "O" word actually has an "O" at the end). no) and stumbled into what I thought was a tidy little set of actual words with a unique spelling of each long vowel. Now that I've been published in the NYT, I guess I have another side hustle?Īs is often the case, I was doing some mental word exercises while trying to fall asleep, this time searching for one-syllable words that start with either a consonant blend or digraph and end with the five long vowels (Blay, Blee, Bly, Blow, Blue.no. I live and work in Minneapolis, including a side-hustle (as pictured in uniform) for my beloved MN Twins helping guests have a great experience at Target Field while I get paid to watch baseball.
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