Crosswords

I grew up in a game-playing and puzzle-solving family and have enjoyed word games and crosswords since I was a kid. In my early, pre-computing teens, I constructed a few crossword puzzles the hard way — graph paper and lots of pencil eraser, see the image at the top of this page — but then gave up the habit for a few decades.

In late 2021, I decided to try constructing again with the ultimate goal of getting published. As a native born New Yorker, I’ve been doing The New York Times puzzle for most of my life and have been a fan of Will Shortz since his Games magazine days. No question it would be coolest to get one of my puzzles onto that site but I’m realistic as to how competitive that has become. As of May 26, 2023, I am now officially published in the LA Times, something I’m very excited about!

Below is a list of my most recently published puzzles; see this page for a list of all of them. My favorites are Themeless #2, Themeless #6 and Blame the Normans. At the bottom of this page, you can search for puzzles by tag based on size or themed/themeless.

I have also been constructing alphabetically focused minis and built a separate microsite for those puzzles.

I hope you enjoy my efforts, I’ll post puzzles here as I develop them and welcome any feedback you have. Expect about one puzzle a month and if you use a news reader you can subscribe to an RSS feed here.

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  1. Blame The Normans

    This puzzle harkens back to late last year when I was building puzzles that were completely themed — although this one is only about 25%...

  2. Themeless Midi (August 2023)

    I’m trying to write more mini and midi puzzles lately and this is a result: my first themeless midi. Given the smaller sized puzzle, I...

  3. Easy Peasy

    I’ve been thinking a lot about how it can be more difficult to make easy puzzles (say Monday NYT), in particular because of how clean...

  4. GHI AlphaMinis

    After a bit of a lull in the AlphaMini project, I am back with three more for the microsite: G, H and I.Remember, there is...

  5. Themeless (June 2023)

    This 70 word themeless came together pretty quickly, both 20-Across and 49-Across have been in my list of longer phrases for awhile now and it...

15x15s - All Crosswords - Larger than 15x15 - Midis - Minis - Published Elsewhere - Themed - Themeless