Welcome to Crossing the Quad, where I construct a crossword puzzle, and you get to solve it. This is the first edition of the year, so I figured it would be nice to start with some background information.

Last year, for my final project in statistics class, I purchased a four-dollar subscription to the New York Times so that I could go around collecting data about the time it took my friends to solve crosswords. At the time, I had relatively little experience solving crosswords, except for a sporadic NYT Mini every now and then, but with a digital archive of puzzles at my fingertips, I began to solve them incessantly. I started solving crosswords in class and while I walked to school, and my hobby grew into an obsession come summer.

By the time my four-week subscription ended, I’d become willing to invest the $4 every month, even without a statistics project.

Now, perhaps you are not yet willing to spend $4 per month for 30 crossword puzzles. That is why I am here: to deliver you NYT-quality crosswords for free, albeit monthly. Maybe, after solving a few, you’ll become just as obsessed with crosswords as I am.

How to solve a crossword puzzle

This first puzzle is Monday-level, fit for a beginner solver. If you are a beginner, you might need to become more familiar with the language of crossword clues. For a more in-depth guide, I recommend this one from the NYT, but I’ll go over a few rules here.

1. Clues must match answers

Every crossword clue will match their answer’s part of speech, tense, plurality and language. For example, if the clue is “Loved”, then the answer must be a past tense verb in English (like, for example, ADORED). Similarly, abbreviated clues denote abbreviated answers.

2. Wordplay

A question mark at the end of a clue (unless the clue is a literal question) indicates some kind of wordplay going on, so the answer to the clue will not be what your mind immediately goes to. For example, “Head line?” could solve to WRINKLE. While your brain first went to the word “headline”, the clue’s true meaning was the lines that form when you raise your eyebrows.

3. Theme

In most crosswords, there will be a theme. A theme connects multiple clues but usually does not connect every clue in the puzzle. Think of it like solving a jigsaw puzzle: There are many pieces, but only after putting them together does the big picture reveal itself.

This puzzle

I had the theme in mind for this first puzzle since August, and I toyed around with it until finally coming up with a solution in late September. Constructing a puzzle, I’ve found, is difficult in two major regards. First is the big creative aspect—executing the theme, which required two pairs of words whose lengths matched and one word with an odd number of letters in the middle, all of which needed to make sense together. Second, though, is what took me months to finish: filling in the grid—a task that might have been simple had I not tried to make the words as easy and Monday-level as possible.

Cluing, surprisingly, is one of the easiest aspects of constructing, and I crammed it into one night. Still, I included some fun wordplay you should look out for.

All said, I hope you enjoy the October puzzle. When you’re done, let The Cypress know your thoughts using this form.