Category: Finding Your Way

The Proof is in the Cryptic

6/26/2017

In just ten days, I'll have my first cryptic crossword in print and I couldn't be more excited. It's being published by Montreal Review of Books, which you can get all over Canada (see here for a list of places that carry it). I'm especially honoured given that this is the first time they've published a cryptic crossword before.

I hadn't really thought of it until my editor called to double-check a word in one of my clues, but proofreading a cryptic crossword puzzle must be really tricky. Clues can sound really weird even when they're right and even a perfectly symmetrical grid can have a structural error (which happened with The Globe and Mail a few months back).

If you don't happen to solve cryptic crosswords, which my editor doesn't (yet), how do you proceed?

6 Comments

Cryptic Coincidences

3/25/2017

1 Comment

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

Every once in a while, when I'm solving a puzzle, the strangest feeling comes over me of being simultaneously in the driver’s seat of my thinking as I tackle a cryptic crossword and a powerless passenger as my brain conjures a word from goodness only knows where.

Take the clue 17 Down on this Saturday’s Globe and Mail cryptic crossword:

1 Comment

The Unbearable Lightness of Cryptics

2/23/2016

2 Comments

About a month ago, the Sunday New York Time’s crossword puzzle blew the mind of a man named Shane Ryan and he wrote a fantastic article for Paste Magazine explaining why.

The theme of the puzzle was Coriolis force (the inertial effect that causes storms to spin in different directions depending on their hemispheric position) and it is applied with such elegance, you really have to see it to appreciate it.

“Look, it’s entirely possible that I’m just a hopeless nerd,” he writes. “Maybe this doesn’t seem as impressive to you as it does to me. But:”

the amount of pleasure this act of brilliance gives me is difficult to describe. It’s just so perfect, so virtuosic, and yet so playful. It’s the Platonic ideal of a crossword puzzle. And the amount of creativity and brainpower it takes to actually conceive of and create it is astounding to me.

2 Comments

Gridlocked

3/14/2015

12 Comments

It's rare but every now and again the Globe and Mail messes up the Saturday cryptic crossword puzzle and mismatches the clues and the grid. We love Fraser Simpson's Saturday morning cryptic over here, as I've said previously, so it's a bummer when we're forced to miss out.

This morning was one of those mornings: the grid started with 1 Across but the clues started with 7 Across. We mourned the lack of puzzle, then moved on to other things. Until my husband said: "I wonder if we could figure it out for ourselves."

12 Comments

The Proof is in the Cryptic

Cryptic Coincidences

The Unbearable Lightness of Cryptics

Gridlocked

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