BIV, the colors of the rainbow, in order. Neat bit of trivia: the Shortz era began with a great tribute to ROY G. Was in awe that Michael could get eight theme entries into a Monday! (I warned him that regardless of the difficulty WE thought this was, it would be slotted for a Monday!) That necessitated many iterations, to get the fill "simple." How nice at the end of all this to see a rainbow! For ?APPY, we went back and forth with HAPPY, NAPPY, SAPPY, YAPPY, and settled on HAPPY as the best word for early week.įWIW, we think the final version contains a minimum of difficult entries. We considered ROYGBIV as the reveal ("Mnemonic for remembering a list of seven of which the starred entries all contain elements") but went back to RAINBOW. In a lengthy exchange (70) of emails, we honed the puzzle till we got something we felt worth submitting. I contacted Andrea Carla Michaels because I felt I needed help with devising an early-week puzzle from someone who has a lot of experience with them. My efforts were an inconsistent mix of easy and difficult entries and clues. I had had four unthemed puzzles published in the NYT by this time, but, although I've had many themed puzzles published, none in the NYT. I revisited the idea and came up with something I could make work by making two of the entries vertical. I concluded it couldn't be done, but then I was trying to fit all entries horizontally. I looked at the puzzle from time to time, but couldn't manage to get eight entries into one puzzle.
![cowpokes sweetie crossword clue cowpokes sweetie crossword clue](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c5/8d/b8/c58db843b40de2c8ab16579a4ebbc696.jpg)
COWPOKES SWEETIE CROSSWORD CLUE PLUS
I tried unsuccessfully to fit seven entries that had all the colors of the rainbow, plus RAINBOW as the reveal. The idea for the puzzle first came to me in 2007.