Nebuchadnezzar gives an insight into the creation of Dire Straits

Spoiler alert – this blog discusses the themes of a few of my previous puzzles.

Please spare a thought for me as I sit staring at a blank page, attempting to retrace my steps. It was – unsurprisingly – a convoluted journey, but I’ll do my best…

I do remember the germ of the idea – I was walking my dog in the autumn of 2023, listening to Joanna Newsom’s album for the 8,127th time and enjoying the pleasing coincidence that the letters of its title fall exactly at the centre of track 4, Only Skin. My theme radar pinged, and I started wondering how I could use it in a puzzle. It took a few more weeks of dog walks to actually make the leap of expanding it to the myth at all.

An early digression: Technically, this is the third of my puzzles inspired in some way by Joanna Newsom, who is responsible for writing more of my favourite music and lyrics than any other individual, and I’m trying my level best not to go on a sickeningly effusive tangent about how great she is… Anyway, in Only Skin, the lines “Last week our picture window produced a half-word / Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird” is a reference to that poor waxwing at the start of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which is how I came to discover that work, which in turn became the starting point for two puzzles connecting Pale Fire, the Bible, Timon of Athens and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. I owe her a great deal.

The next idea (which I didn’t use either – I told you it was convoluted!) was to consider Ys as in ‘plural of Y’. I love puzzles which contain an unusual, theme-influenced entry method and so I considered entries being grouped in threes, entered on a hexagonal grid in the shape of a Y, sharing the cell at the centre. I’m still quite fond of this, but building a grid with a sensible rate of unchecked letters was beyond me and I let that one go.

I can’t quite remember the order of ideas, but the oldest file in my folder named Ys contains this:

Notice ONL (YS) KIN in the middle – the thematic element from which everything else developed, but got heartlessly ditched as more enticing trinkets presented themselves (ah, so that’s why they call it the Magpie…)

While I’m in that folder, actually, I’ll share the contents of a text file in which I had a lot of fun looking for a suitable anagram (something I learnt from Charybdis, who has used the apposite anagram to wonderful effect on a few occasions). The order of interesting words/phrases I discovered before I finally settled on DELUGE A LETHAL CREATION reads as follows:

NAUTICAL TALE – HEROIC LEGEND – NAUTICAL LORE – GATED AREA – ATOLL AND GATE – INCH DELUGE – REALLOCATE (not thematic, just a very crossword-y word!) – LET IN DELUGE – CREATION DELUGE – DELUGE A LETHAL CREATION.

The initial timeline (as well as the general chaos of my personal setting process) is perhaps best shown by the folder’s contents – there were 34 files in all, but this should give you the general idea:

So it appears that I had the grid sorted by Christmas, and I am extremely grateful to the Qxw software for making the puzzle possible, in particular the ‘free lights’ function, which I only remembered to use after a very frustrating month of trying to make it all work manually. All those ‘real words at the end’ shenanigans would not have been possible without Quinapalus’s remarkable program. In fact, such was the strength of this compiling software that I was actually able to add the jumble of EVARISTE VITAL LUMINAIS after all other entries (i.e. those which didn’t intersect with that string) had been added.

I hope it is clear that the decision to have so many jumbles was borne out of necessity rather than cruelty, and was justified. Luckily, Literary Legacy by Mr Magoo (December 2023) came out at just the right time, and inspired me to include a mechanism in which a clue could provide information as to how its answer should be entered. I apologise for ‘In light of a disastrous event, answers […] must be entered as jumbles’. Clearly, a more truthful preamble would have said ‘In light of the fact Nebuchadnezzar has over-constrained himself once again, quite a lot of this is jumbled, sorry’. Oh, and while we’re on the preamble-related apologies, I promise there was no intention to catch people out when considering how far to extend the lines of that Y. The risk of an ambiguity being overlooked is obviously a lot higher when you’ve got a fair amount of going on, but I am sorry if the lingering doubt of a correct submission (a feeling with which I am very well acquainted) got in the way of enjoying the solve.

When it came to the clues, I was conscious that I hadn’t given Newsom’s masterpiece enough of an airing (Debussy and Escher are both represented by sharing that title, as well as the shape of Escher’s woodcut). Luckily, the album’s absurd levels of verbosity meant that I could restrict the extra words to any which appeared in the lyrics (as well as a few Debussy performance directions for good measure). Using the excellent site onlinetexttools.com – a great resource, strongly recommended – I managed to get all the lyrics from the album, remove any duplicates and sort them alphabetically. It turns out I had 1,138 different words to choose from, but even then it was pretty limited – I had to do a bodge job of CUTINIZE, since HANDSOME isn’t actually on the album at all, but HAND and SOME are there at separate points. I hope you can forgive me. I provided a list to the editors when I submitted the puzzle, and I am very thankful to them for humouring me with this particular element which was, I’m aware, almost certainly not going to be noticed until the publication of the solution, and referring to the list accordingly when improving my clues.

That pretty much covers it, aside from a few broader concepts which I’ve not managed to cover in this ramble so far, so forgive the shoehorn: I like the idea that in this case, the dedicatees – Debussy, Escher and Newsom – were themselves representing a pre-existing theme, the myth of Ys, in their own ways. This is why myths make such ideal themes, as thematic crosswords and myths are both heavily involved in the business of re-telling/representing something else, and in so doing creating something which is very much A Thing in its own right, artistically. It is those sorts of connections – and especially the very unlikely ones – which interest me the most. In fact, the original (and perhaps rightful) title of this puzzle was (is?) Star Connections, due to certain thematic coincides with the first two Star Connection puzzles – the Nabokov link, as discussed earlier, but also the significance of a central S. More generally, the puzzles are linked by an attempt to connect seemingly disparate stars (see meaning #10 of star in Chambers: A pre-eminent or exceptionally brilliant person) and their works. Oh, and also, according to Chambers, a star connection is ‘a Y-shaped three-phase electrical connection’. So there’s that. There’s also a more mundane, logistical concern here, in that I worry I’m not ever going to be sufficiently prolific to be able to make a puzzle about everyone/everything on my list, so I’m killing a few waxwings with one window.

My heartfelt thanks go to anyone who took the time to leave feedback, and to Darren/Shark for doing a magnificent job of testing, as ever. Also, many thanks to the editors for accepting the puzzle, especially since I’ve not got a clue where I’d have sent the blasted thing if they didn’t publish it!

Posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2025 at 4:20 pm under Setting the scene.
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