Here are some e-heavy clues. Four are pretty solid, and the last three are, I think, increasingly strained.
Teens’ redness—ACNE
Elements’ elements—ATOMS
Greens keeper—SALAD BAR
Freed Grey, née Steele—ANASTASIA
Peeled, sweet-fleshed crescent—BANANA
Sphere-segment reference where legends were—ATLAS
Be ____: mete cheer, be meek, genteel—A SPORT
As you may be starting to sense, using only e as a vowel can be even more restrictive than not using e at all. I still tried, for a lot longer than I probably should have, to get these e-only clues to work. But the results were rarely rewarding for me, and I’m sure would’ve been even less rewarding for the solver.
Then I tried the opposite direction. Could I write e-less clues? Usually I could, so this became a more insidious kind of trap.
Not yours, in Tours—A MOI
Purplish salad bit—BEET
You can see me working around words like “mine,” “purple,” and “vegetable” with minimal difficulty. But what to do with Madeleine L’ENGLE, who’s really only famous for A Wrinkle in Time? Or BEEB, which calls for a clue that includes the words “with ‘the’” or “The ___”?
I could’ve probably figured out my way to an e-less set of 4,572 clues eventually—I just couldn’t do it and also stick to my production schedule for the year. So while the Ubercross Small e has e-less clues, the Ubercross Abecedaria E has clues that are only partly “separated.” I still like a lot of the results I got from trying…what I said before about constraints pushing you to be creative, that’s still true. But sometimes working with constraints also helps you discover your limits.