Here’s hoping this one isn’t Tough as Nails at all!
Tag: puzzle
Tough as Nails Themeless #68
July has been a very crammed month with puzzle projects I hope to be able to tell you about very soon. Yay! Also, if you want something done, ask a busy person. If the something you want done is a crossword puzzle or trivia questions, you should ask this busy person! (Assuming we agree on a pay rate, of course. Mama don’t work “for exposure.”)
This is the one place I do make puzzles for free — and here’s the latest.
Tough as Nails Themeless #67
My motto in life lately is, “If you want something done, ask a busy person.” I’m glad I had a nice vacation, because now it’s time to be productive as hell! Will announce all the various projects I have going on when I’m allowed to do so.
In the meantime, I’m not too busy to keep the puzzles coming. Enjoy! (Yes, I can see that the font size on the links is different. No, I don’t feel like figuring it out right now.)
Oneth-of-the-Month Mini Cryptic #7
I’m on vacation! You still get a puzzle! Aren’t I nice?
Tough as Nails Themeless #66
First of all, to those who’ve left comments re: errors on the last couple of puzzles, thank you for being polite about it; I’ve had issues with rude commenters in the past, and I appreciate that folks have stuck to the facts lately instead of name-calling. I apologize for the errors. (I continue to publish puzzles without an editor or test solvers, which means I can get you this stuff on the regular and without charging you, but also that sometimes I fuck up.)
I’m on vacation as this post goes up, and will have some exciting puzzle projects that I hope to be able to tell you all about soon when I get back. It’s going to be a busy summer! In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this puzzle while I’m gone.
Oneth of the Month Mini Cryptic #6
It’s themeless day AND cryptic day today! 1-Across is a nod to the season.
Oneth-of-the-Month Mini Cryptic #5
I hope these lil’ puzzles are helpful with graduating some of you to solving a full-sized cryptic for the first time!
Oneth-of-the-Month Mini Cryptic #4
Hope you’ve been enjoying the minis and using them as a way to dip your toe in the cryptic waters! Here’s another quickie for you.
Hope to see many of you at ACPT this weekend!
Oneth of the Month Mini Cryptic #3
Yeah, yeah, I know, 1-Across is a word I just clued as a #crypticclueaday. If I were smarter, I’d have saved it for today, since it makes a lot more sense today than this past Sunday.
Hope these minis are helping you work up to bigger puzzles!
A 21x if you wanna: “Crossing the Pond”
One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2022 has been to work myself up to constructing 21x puzzles comfortably. For those who think I’ve done that plenty already, I have not, at least not all the way: In my years as half of the Daily-Venzke constructing pair, I did all the cluing and much of the theme generating, but none of the gridding. And thus I’m not nearly as experienced a gridmaker as some people believe I am, and making a big ole puzzle is something that still intimidates me and that I’m not always sure how to do. It’s something I WANT to do, though, since the market for 21x has so much less competition than 15s. Hence, my resolution to systematically teach myself how to do this.
Where I am with my New Year’s resolution is that I’ve studied a number of 21x grids to see what they have in common re: theme entry placement, and I have tried generating a theme set that matches the lengths of theme entries in a grid that follows a pattern I’ve noticed, placing the entries in that grid design, and filling the grid around it. I’ll do that again a few times before I try designing a grid on my own. With these efforts, I’m generally not coming up with the most interesting themes since I’m not looking for practice on theme generation and if I come up with a theme I think is awesome, I’ll save it for when I’m better at making a grid so I can try and sell that puzzle. From time to time I may throw one of the puzzles I make on this site if I think it doesn’t suck.
The above description does NOT apply to the puzzle I’m posting today. I like this theme a lot, enough so that I made the puzzle back in late 2020 when it was even more of a slog for me to try to make a 21x than it is now. I tried selling it a couple of different places, but editorial consensus seems to be that the theme is a little too esoteric for most. But hey, this site is Tough as Nails and that’s what you all come here for, right? So here’s the puzzle, and I’m going to caveat: My inexperience in 21x gridmaking will be evident. I hope you enjoy it anyway, should you choose to give it a go!
Crosswords and Trivia by Stella Zawistowski 