Removals: a Shark’s-eye view
This is my third puzzle since my last setters blog. Back in January, Waterfall had the lowest number of correct entries and highest number of incorrect entries. Luckily that all changed when Pointer came along and let me off the hook with the wily Colour Sequence. Experiment was much more successful, but still has the lowest entry rate behind Pieman’s two efforts. Removals will hopefully even out the balance for me.
I thought of creating a crossword where the unches spell out an instruction, but I wanted those unches to be in a set pattern. The original layout of the unches hasn’t changed from that first day setting the crossword, but the theme has on several occasions.
I originally created it so that by connecting these unches formed three separate octagons of different sizes, however I could not get a theme out of that idea. Connecting them continuously in the shape of an X using a curved line looks like a propeller. I thought of having clashes evenly throughout the long 10 letter words, which spell out ‘airscrew’ but I couldn’t seem to create a grid of real words. It then dawned on me that the X was like a cross and the other word for checked letters is ‘crossing letters’. So a theme based around the X or cross was born.
Unfortunately filling the grid was still very difficult. I could not fill the grid with the instruction starting in the top left corner and took several moves to make it work. Moving this starting letter from unch to unch landed success in the middle. A little tweaking, I managed to find words that if I removed the letters of ‘crossing’ still left real words. The other four words with removed synonyms of ‘cross’ and X were a little trickier. I thought that given that most clues were normal, together with the very low unch rate (none in the 10-letter entries), it would be on the easy side. However, the denouement appeared to be slightly tricky despite adding the synonyms of ‘cross’ and X.
The preamble had several edits to try and help the solver, but I think the C grade reflects the denouement rather than the grid-fill. So fingers ‘crossed’ that this does not result in similar problems to those of Waterfall. You will be pleased to know that the next time you see a Shark puzzle in The Magpie there will be something completely different…I promise.