Wyna Liu is an associate puzzle editor for The Times, which she joined in 2020. She helps select and edit clues for the puzzles that appear in the paper. The thing she loves most about her job is "talking puzzles with other people who love them!" (That would be the rest of us on the games team.)
When Wyna isn't working, she makes jewelry and magnetic objects, teaches yoga and spoils her dog.
Wyna Liu notes:Ever since I discovered the joy of puzzle hunts and meta-puzzles, I've wanted to make a crossword whose theme entries were connected by an additional layer. Today's theme was inspired by a couple of visual wordplay puzzles I saw in an old Games Magazine compilation, and it originally included the use of pictures.
The working title for this puzzle was "Over Here!" The criteria I settled on for the themers were that they were each three syllables long and that every segment in a theme clue would have a different spelling than its corresponding part in the answer.
Some early theme entries I considered, but couldn't use for one reason or another, were "Place for rouge + ___ + Pre-euro German money," "Deadly offense + ___ + Piece of legislation + Happy cat's sound," "___ + Vietnamese noodle soup + Midler's "Divine" persona" and "Martial arts legend Jackie + ___ + Knight's title + Christmas tree." Thanks to Joel for workshopping themers with me!
My favorite clues are for 59-Across and 83-/95-Down; the latter clue combo is a nod to my mother, who loves Disneyland. (生日快樂媽媽! Happy birthday, mom!).
Jeff Chen notes:Solvers, take a letter! Take ten of them, in fact; each one a part of a phonetic chain that completes a phrase. Sounds good?
I C, U need an example. [Presses CTRL+P + ___ + Easter egg coloring] might seem like cryptic-rebus shenanigans, but it translates into PRINTS + S + DYE = PRINCESS DI. With some phonetic liberties.
The star of the show was [Rug rat + Magic stick + ___], because it broke TAE KWON DO so unexpectedly. It's easy to connect AWL + AXE + S = ALL ACCESS; much more difficult and interesting to link TYKE + WAND + O into the martial art.
It would have been great for electronic solvers to have someplace to write the missing letters. Where, though? Having SOUNDS GOOD as the final answer would have been overkill, but it's better than leaving the door open for solvers to ignore the meta answer or get annoyed by having to assemble it mentally.
The print version had a chance to shine over its 21st-century counterpart. Where can you write in the letters? In the blanks within the clues! However, the pdf is formatted so that column one of the clues produces SOUND and column two gives SGOOD. With a slight shift, having SOUNDS (all in column one) / GOOD (all in column two) would have been so much more elegant.
Although there weren't as many fist-pumpingly awesome breaks like TYKE WAND O, I enjoyed experiencing different; not simply yet another tried-and-true theme type. The novelty alone gets much more an A than an eh?
* This article was originally published here
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