Puzzle Notes

Dear solvers,

We're delighted to bring you a debut puzzle this week! When Alexis Viera's clues turned up in our inbox during our May submission period, we knew we wanted to work with her to bring her fresh voice to the cryptic scene.

Alexis Viera (she/her) is a private investigator living in Queens, New York. When she's not digging into her cases, she's digging herself into a hole by procrastinating work with crossword puzzles. The only facet of her sense of humor is wordplay, so you can see how cryptics pretty quickly became her favorite thing. This is Alexis's first published puzzle, and she would like to thank her husband for his encouragement, her editor for the guidance, and her key-mashing cat for all of the unsolicited edits. If you'd like to follow Alexis's cryptic construction journey, check out her blog!

We hope you'll enjoy the puzzle -- and if, when you're done, you'd like to join Alexis in the ranks of AVCX cryptic constructors, we're still open for clue submissions for the remainder of this month. There's not much of September left, so get crackin'!

Be well,
The AVCX Cryptic team