Puzzle 11: JKL M ‘n’ O (with Ken Stern, featuring Laura Braunstein)

Here’s another puzzle we gave out at Lollapuzoola. The theme for this came when autocorrect garbled a message Laura sent to our metapuzzle group. I came up with a few more entries that could fit the theme, and then she tweeted the original out and a bunch of crossword twitter folks had a lot of fun coming up with many, many more themers, some of which were reasonable, and some of which were 26 letters long. Since Laura was responsible for the whole thing, I suggested we collaborate again, but she was too busy and recommended I team up with Ken instead.

But first I reached out to Nate Cardin, since he had used this exact theme in a puzzle back in January, to make sure he didn’t mind us duplicating his idea. (Nate is the organizer and editor of Queer Qrosswords, a pack of 22 really good puzzles that you can get by donating $10 or more to any LGBTQ+ charity. If you didn’t solve them last year, you should go get them now. If you did solve them, you should get Queer Qrosswords 2 as soon as it’s available.)

Ken and I settled on a set of themers, I set up a grid, and we proceeded to fill it with some really C-level entries. Luckily, by then Laura had some more free time, and between the three of us we managed to get most of the fill up to at least B-level and finished writing the clues a whole 16 hours before Lollapuzzola started.

This was truly a group effort, but I want to acknowledge that Ken came up with the awesome title, and Laura wrote the clue for 49-Across, since she’s always wanted to use that clue.

• PUZ File
• PDF File
• Solution