Hi all. Wow, it's Halloween! I guess this mini is seasonally appropriate, albeit less so than my AVCX grid from last week (which was - spoilers - awesome!), but probably a little moreso than my Crossword Club puzzle for tomorrow. Hope you like this one as much as those two. Later this week you'll get a "these were the puzzles I had opinions about" recap post for October, which will hopefully be much more sustainable to make than my earlier attempts to be in that space this year.
Nothing to say this week, really. I have a puzzle with AVCX Classic in a week or two that's got, I think, the most concise and brilliant angle ever conceived for a very common crossword entry. So there's that to look forward to.
Well, here's the puzzle. There's a bit of a gimmick here, and a very on-brand one at that. Hope you like it.
A couple weeks ago I met up with some friends for dinner in Downtown Brooklyn. I had not really been to downtown since my high school days a decade prior, but not matter. I assumed I would have an easy time navigating from the subway to the restaurant - I would just use the Williamsburgh Savings Bank's clock tower as a massive compass needle, with Brooklyn Tech's spire and radio antenna as a backup, and use that as my north star. I had no such luck - apparently, in the past decade, skyscrapers had bloomed seemingly everywhere within a two-mile radius of the Barclays Center. My memories of a pre-Kyrie Irving downtown were useless, conquered by concrete kudzu.
It is in moments like this where I most appreciate Olga Dies Dreaming, the debut novel by Xochitl Gonzalez. I liked the novel a lot, despite its many flaws, largely because I am demographically obligated to - how could I not love this novel by a Mexican-American Bensonhurster, which claims to be dedicated to "South Brooklyn girls who stare at the water, dreaming," and then backs that claim up at least once per page for 400 pages? In heroine Olga Acevedo I see a mirror of my own strivings and failings. It is very rarely that I feel seen by a work of fiction with this level of precision.
Ergo, I was willing to put up with the shittier, didactic parts of the novel. So many of the secondary characters seem to talk straight past our protagonist and zero in on the reader, not so much speaking as orating, delivering multi-page lectures about Puerto Rican history for the sake of gringos on Goodreads for whom the greatest compliment you can give a book is "intersectional." Eventually, belatedly, these characters mostly become real people instead of The Jones Act for Dummies audiobooks. But not all of them, and especially not Olga's seemingly endless parade of lovers. I have seen Olga Dies Dreaming described/derided as "chick lit," which isn't wrong, naked misogyny aside. The book insists on the cover that it is A Novel but in my mind it is more of A Fanfiction, converting a century of Boricua radicalism into grist for love triangles. Which is only a negative insofar as that element of the book is so obvious - gee, will Olga fall for the white gazillionaire real estate mogul-slash-vulture, or the homeboy whose eyes and freckles merit a paragraph's worth of descriptors!?!?
And yet despite that cynicism I really did love the book, and its characters, and its lovingly chaotic depiction of a whole family ecosystem, and the parts where Gonzalez doesn't feel the need to explain la cultura to los blancos and instead just writes down the experience of walking down an ungentrified Sunset Park block for five pages. I even kind of loved the goofy fairytale ending. Great book. Four stars.
Wow, that was a lot of opinions. Anyway, here's a 5x5. It's times like these, when I forget to post the puzzle at the start of the week, where I'm glad I don't have these called "Monday Minis" anymore. There will actually be a new full-size QVXword this Thursday - a very lovely themeless which I got test-solved and everything! - and hopefully there will be more than one of them in the coming weeks. Love you all.
This is a labor of love for Kelsey, who I appreciate even though she repeatedly negs me for my choices in e-mail providers and/or romantic partners like a you-know-what. >:(
Also, I realized that people want links to the fullscreen puzzle because the applet can be a little weird as an embed on some computers, so if you click on the "fullscreen link" down there it'll open up the puzzle in a new tab or window or whatever. This is what we in the know call a "quality of life feature."
Throwing the nerds a Q-bone with this one. Get it? Q, like QVXwordz? But also like... Oh, you'll get it. Or maybe you won't? WHATEVER!!! YOU'RE NOT MY MOM!!!!!
HEY, IT'S STILL MONDAY, TECHNICALLY. And, you know what? This isn't "Mini Monday" anymore. It's "Five by Five." I cast off that temporal anchor three months ago! Get off my ass!! You're not my REAL mom!!! Etc, etc.
Paolo was kind enough to test solve this one (and even suggested a much better clue than what I originally had for one of these) so thank you, Paolo! I would remiss if I did not mention that he posted the 100th puzzle on his blog last week and that it is a total mindfuck, so please check it out. I think it will take you *slightly* longer than this five-by-five will, though. Just a guess. So maybe start with this one? Give it a go and tell me what you think.
Literally everyone liked my Inkubator puzzle, which was a very nice feeling! This reminds me I need to update the "Other Published Puzzles" page (or at the very least, import that over to my website, which is a thing that will I hope replace QVXwordz at some point). Anyway, here is a pretty straightforward 5x5. The gag here is pretty obvious, but what can I say, I prefer the mind to enter into a deeper state of calculation. Enjoy. New grid on Thursday with some "experimental" aspects, which you may or may not enjoy.
I know, I know. What happened to "every Monday," Q? Lots of things, actually, some of which I am legally required not to talk about right now! Not to mention, I have been chipping away at those last couple monthly roundups, belated as they are. Anyway, here is a 5x5 for y'all. More to come soon. Have fun with this one!
I think this is a smidge closer to what you'd think a mini puzzle by me would look like than the previous 5x5s have been. Don't feel bad if you have to Google stuff on this one.
Hm, is it June already? That means we're halfway through the submission period at AVCX, among other things. One such other thing: me and Alex Boisvert did an acrostic together! Maybe don't do that one at work.
Slightly late Five by Five today because my Internet was being uncooperative the past few days. It's all good now. I make these in advance but I rarely queue them up in advance, is the thing. I hope you enjoy this grid either way.
A double dose of Five by Fives this week to make up for lost time. Sid Sivakumar kindly gave this one a whirl before it went to print; what a mensch. I think this is my favorite grid of the initial bunch, on account of how coherent this one feels. 5x5s are kind of punishing to do well on account of you only having ten entries, all of which have to interlock, which makes it sort of a small miracle that this grid has such pleasing symmetry to it (you'll know what I mean after you solve it). Enjoy.
If you didn't do it, I edited an AVCX grid last week by Parker Higgins and Mali Handa titled "Low Scores," which kind of totally rocks!?!? Give it a whirl if you haven't already.
Inspired by last week's Times Sunday, which falsely identified 6-Across as a rapper (happy as I was to see him referenced), and also by my friend Allison who interviewed 8-Across recently (which I assume was a life goal of hers, as it would be for any journalist). Enjoy.
I know this sounds fake, but I didn't really intend for the theme here to B ("be") a thing until I got to the down entries and said "hey wait a minute." Thank you to Kate Chin Park for playtesting this and assuring me this was not pointlessly forced. (Kelsey helped too but I refuse to thank her for anything.)
P.S.: I think this is a good time to remind anyone reading this blog casually that I have an e-mail address and am always down to chat with people who have considered making crosswords but have no idea where to start, or people who have made crosswords but worry they're not very good at it and want guidance on how to suck less. And I'm really, *really* down to chat with those of you who are going, "gee, I really vibed with this puzzle, Quiara, but I've never really thought of myself as the kind of person who makes crosswords," because I'll level with you: this blog is very much pitched towards other constructors, so if you're gelling with it, you probably do have "constructor brain" (which is definitely a thing) and would probably be decent at puzzlemaking. Or you just really dig Migos, which is a trait more crossword constructors should have anyway. Either way - I don't bite!
Belated 5x5 because I had to make a new puzzle to accommodate current events.
Speaking of current events, did you see that last week I had a guest puzzle on BEQ's site!? Everyone loved it, with the exception of nearly every commenter on CrosswordFiend. But everyone else loved it, other than the 36 people on BEQ's site who wrote in to tell me that I am a deranged maniac. But everyone else loved it, if by "everyone" you mean Sam Ezersky (a person who no one on the Internet has EVER said anything mean about):
@quiarados your guest puzzle today (on @fleetwoodwack's site) will go down as a personal favorite!! The theme itself, the ahas throughout, the whole grid … take a freakin bow
— Sam Ezersky (@thegridkid) May 5, 2022
What an endorsement! See you next week.
Anyway, the monthly roundups for March and April are on tap for this week, as is another guest spot on a different blog. But I have a much more exciting feature for you all to check out, namely... the return of Mini Mondays! Or Monday Minis. Or whatever the hell I called them. Called, past tense, because as of today they're now called Five by Fives. You can remember the name because it's what Faith said all the time on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and also because the grids are literally 5x5s. I have about eight of these queued up for the next two months, after which point I might get a tad more ambitious with the format. (E.g., I might do a vowelless... or a consonantless... or a squeeze phrase... etc etc.) Because they're so tiny I don't think it's really worth making a PDF or .puz for these.
Anyway, see you Thursday - or possibly before then. Applet ABOVE the cut, because I feel like being quirky and cool.
