Puzzle Notes

Dear friends,

It's the AV Classic debut of Ariel Haymarket [e/em/eir], who has a themeless for us this week (what with AV+ in the house, we're running one themeless every other month) at 4/5 difficulty.

Says Ariel: "This particular puzzle was crafted during the Boswords Open Submissions period (December 2021 through January 2022) and clued on spec with the intent of ruining the hopes of those wanting an errorless tournament score. My thanks go out to Will Eisenberg and Quiara Vasquez for putting up with my griping about the many, many hours, if not days, of fiddling with this particular puzzle's seed entry, as well as Ben Tausig for helping me realize what exactly was causing me trouble (note to self: I owe the three of y'all a beer)."

Ariel [e/em/eir] lives and works in the Dallas area as an educator for students with special needs. When e isn't distracted by Twitter drama, e constructs crosswords for the Crosshare community, publishing - by eir own admission - difficult puzzles on eir personal blog, Haymarket Squares (no relation to the punkgrass group).



Yrs,
Ben and the expanded AVCX crew
avxwords.com // @avcxword // @lilavcx // @avcxplus // @avcxtrivia // @avcxcryptic