Australian Crosswords

Recently I was chuffed to find a reference to The Stickler Weekly in an article featured in The Atlantic, an American monthly publication. For many years The Atlantic published cryptics by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, two of my cryptic crossword heroes. The article’s main thrust is the future of crosswords in a newspaper-free/digital age, and relays the views of two prominent crossword commentators, Alan Connor, who writes a crossword blog for The Guardian in the UK, and Michael Sharp who runs one a the US’s most popular blogs. Even though they both talk about “crosswords”, they are in fact talking about cryptics (in Alan’s case) and US-style 100% checked themed puzzles (in Michael’s case), and I think the distinction is necessary to get the full picture. I don’t believe cryptics translate to the online world as easily as other crosswords do, simply because of the time needed to solve them. Even if you ignore the fact that the majority of cryptic solvers are in the older age-groups that haven’t fully embraced the digital age, who wants to spend a couple of hours in front of a screen solving a crossword? I provide a printable version of The Stickler Weekly, but solvers have to go and get it, rather than it coming to them as with a newspaper. It’s very intentional and not everyone’s cup of tea.
Before reading the article I wouldn’t have considered the US-style crossword in danger of extinction, but it seems younger generations across the world aren’t captivated by what is now an old-style puzzle no matter what flavour it is or what form it takes.

In the early days I had no luck plugging my cryptic crosswords, so I turned to writing themed crosswords to try and sell to magazines, believing I was on a sure winner. Trouble is, writing theme crosswords is hard and time-consuming, and editors are generally under the impresssion that a theme crossword should contain 100% theme words. As a relative novice, I thought this sounded reasonable and consequently failed every time. A while back I mentioned the first dedicated crossword PC program I used called Crossword Designer (CD). At the time I considered it a powerful tool as, for the first time, I could fill a grid with words of my choice. I was a young setter and knew this tool gave me a huge advantage and I set about trying to exploit it. CD offered new hope with theme crosswords, with the facility to use my own wordlists and pick my own words. I targetted the gardening magazine sector as there were a few on the market and there are so many plants and garden-related things. Many, many hours followed compiling a wordlist from the indexes of every gardening/plant book I could find, and searching dictionaries and thesauruses. I even went through the entire Encyclopedia Botanica. Every suitable noun got a plural entry and every verb ended up with multiple related entries. At various times during my wordlist build I tried auto-filling some grids just to see if I had enough words to work with. I think about 1000 words gives some hope of a complete fill, 2000 gives multiple options and 5000 gives great choice. I’ve still got that wordlist with 5600 entries, but it has an inherent problem – about 70% of the words aren’t usable as plant names don’t generally have synonyms and plant descriptions aren’t clue-sized and unlikely to identify a specific plant anyway. I didn’t think of that until I filled 15 grids with garden words and found most of the entries were for obscure plants that I couldn’t clue! You live and learn.