Spoiler Monday: Into The Unknown
Dangers of the wild frontier.
The image below shows a fair-sized chunk of the Ubercross Abecedaria U…in its first draft. It has a lot that I like, a lot that I don’t. That part’s normal: working on the Ubercross scale means leaving perfectionism behind. But at some point, I realized I couldn’t sign off on this one. Because the stuff that I don’t like, I really don’t like.
POP BLAM, HALLOWEEN FASHION DON’TS, NOBLE’S ENZYME, HYPE YODA, NCAA MOTH, HEROES FROM ILIUM, INITIAL HORROR, OREO’S TOOTH? No problems there. MORSE COPT? AM OF IOTAS? ELAT CASHEW? MAE’S SHNOOK? PATTI AUDIENCE? UMPTEEN EEL? No love there.
Why didn’t I stop myself as soon as I realized I was making any of those entries, back up and do something else? I certainly do stop myself, back up, and try again a lot when making other puzzles. And I did it with this puzzle too. Just not nearly often enough. Why not?
Well, when you gaze into the abyss long enough, the difference between wacky and totally nonsensical starts to blur. Untethered from normality for days at a time, I started to drift into the realm of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, where words meant just what I wanted them to mean, no more, no less.
From 2021 to 2022, I ended up going through three drafts of the Ubercross Abecedaria U—and I still wasn’t happy with it. So earlier this month, I reworked the contents of the U for a fourth and final go-round, and this time I even changed the grid, in a way that I hoped would sprinkle some easy-to-cross “relief spots” through its structure.
I don’t really care for how the new grid looks—all those attempts at curvy U-shapes give the U the feeling of melted wax to me, and the sweeping diagonals of the older U were better contrast with its background. But I can’t deny that the contents were improved, and that’s what matters. (And those umlaut-u smiley faces on the new one are fun, I should’ve made more of those.)
A few quick tips for the would-be anything-goes writer:
Mind your parts of speech. You want almost every multi-word construction to follow a familiar pattern in English. There can be exceptions to this, but too many of them will result in too many tortured clues that bog down your solver. Something like…
[adjective] [noun]
[verb form] [plural noun/name]
[verb form] (a/an/the) [noun]
[adverb] [adjective]
Know how to bend them. You can use a noun as an adjective in a construction like HALLOWEEN FASHION DON’TS. And you can “verb” a noun for some imagined but understandable slang like MATTHEW PERRYING (“Talking like Chandler from Friends”…RIP to a real one, by the way.) But don't bend more than one rule per answer.
Visualize. An answer you can form a sensory picture of is usually better than one you can’t.
Conserve glue. As in more traditional crosswords, OREO and AREA are really useful because (1) they’re mostly vowel, (2) they’re common letters, and (3) they’re well-known words. They also pair well with a lot of other words, especially now that Oreo seems determined to put out limited-edition packages in every flavor in the world.
But most crossword software is designed to prevent you from using words more than once. In smaller puzzles, that rule should be followed strictly, but even on the Ubercross scale, you’re working with software designed to follow it. So you can end up “running out” of the easy words if you use them too early or often.
Relax, have fun, and take your time. Haste makes waste!
Tomorrow: Something light, probably! Have a good spooky season, everyone…
