i got a puzzle published for the first time!!!

Hi! Spoilers below for my puzzle (NYT Friday, 2/2/24)!

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I'm so excited to have been published in the New York Times today! This puzzle was genuinely the first themeless I ever wrote, excluding this semi-themeless puzzle which I don't really count. So it's definitely a bit surprising that it got published, but it's a pleasant surprise.

I'll go into some more details to expand upon what I said in the Wordplay article. As I mentioned there, my main seed was at 33A, which I had in my very short list called "themeless seeds????" in my "crossword ideas" note on the Notes app. I honestly don't remember how it made its way in there, but it may have had to do with this bit from Lemony Snicket in A Series of Unfortunate Events (it also appears in the book but I've watched the series much more recently than I read the books) (also, my original clue for 33A referenced that line, but it's definitely a niche reference). Anyway, the phrase BELLY OF THE BEAST was in my short-term memory for whatever reason when I put it down in my seed list, noticing that it was 15 letters long. At some point I decided to try to turn it into a puzzle and I decided to cross another spanner going vertically down the middle of the puzzle. The only constraint I had was having a T as the middle letter; I really liked having SUNK-COST FALLACY going down like that because it's literally "sinking" down the grid. I think I also felt a bit of a connection to the phrase because there's a Better Call Saul episode called "Sunk Costs" and I tend to remember random things like that (plus I love the show).

From here, I decided to go for stacks in all the corners as I thought that was a nice complement to the pair of spanners down the middle. I'm really happy with how all the stacks turned out, plus I got to include another pair of 8-letter words apart from the stacks and the spanners. My favorite entries aside from the spanners include IN ECSTASY, DR. MARTENS, LAY AN EGG, MY SHARONA, and METADATA. There were a couple things I wish I could've done better: (n-)TUPLES are a bit esoteric, and ARGOS doesn't really have a lot of super-well-known cluing angles. But in general I was really happy with how this turned out.

Clue-wise, I'm really grateful to my dad for being a sounding board for my clue ideas. I thought of a good number of clues myself, but some resulted from some back-and-forth between us until I was happy with a cluing angle. In total, out of 70 clues:

• 29 stayed exactly the same (41%)
• 19 were tweaked slightly (minor rewordings, but with the same essence of the clue) (27%)
• 22 were changed more than slightly or completely (31%)
  

Some clues I was sad didn't make the cut:

• [Fishing net?] for HAUL (I assume this was too hard—I think "a number of fish caught" is a lesser-known definition of HAUL)
• [Team on base?] for ARMY
• [Bad investment strategy?] for SUNK-COST FALLACY (I liked this clue, but I figured I should defer to the editors)
• [Former home of the Beatles' Jojo] for TUCSON (not a super-obscure reference, but I get why it was cut) (also, I initially misspelled TUCSON when writing it here... what a pesky C-S pair)
  
• [Nickname for Toronto's C.F.L. team, whose logo references a Greek mythological ship] for ARGOS (i.e., the Toronto Argonauts. I actually tried pushing back on this, but alas)
• [Cry from a certain 30-Down regular] for D'OH (where 30D is MOE'S; I liked this cross-reference and it would've been nice if it stayed!)

Overall I'm really excited about my first publication and I'm thrilled that it's happening in the NYT. Not that the NYT is the be-all and end-all though; there are so many other wonderful outlets out there (like the ones on this sheet)! I've loved familiarizing myself with various constructors' work by solving the puzzles that get shared on Daily Crossword Links, which I've been doing daily for several months, as well as through Crosscord. Anyway, here's to the next one! As usual, here's a music rec: