Announcing this very blog at this very conference. Meta! (photo by Brooke Husic)

I was recently honored to deliver some remarks at the second annual Crossword Con, held by Puzzmo at Hearst’s titanically impressive Manhattan HQ. My talk, “The Long Road to a Good Shortcut,” was about my journey with crosswords, and how I got into and out of my own way in constructing them. The talk is also a pretty good introduction to my whole deal in general!

Becoming more of a crossword person has been enriching and fun, but this was the first time I really felt like I met the community face to face. Everyone was warm, generous, and impossibly clever. I got to hang with folks like the developer of software that I use and one of the constructors behind Vulture’s rad daily pop-culture puzzle. Generally, I learned that the wider world of puzzle construction is indeed much wider than what I had known.

Big thanks to Brooke, who directed a hell of a program, for inviting me to speak. Also: Wow, socially, it really does help to give a talk at a conference. You don’t have to start any conversations. Thanks to everybody who said hi! And to those of you who followed up to ask about the tools I discussed in the talk: Still working on releasing those. I have a new game studio now (burying the lede, buddy!), and part of our practice will be periodically open-sourcing tools like these — both to share them and to make them better.

(Ironically, I gave this whole talk about building tools to make constructing crossword puzzles easier… and then last handful of puzzles I’ve made since writing the talk, I’ve ended up going with a hand-constructed grid. I don’t know what it is — sometimes these things are useful, sometimes they aren’t. I guess, as with any art form, part of the art is in choosing which tools you will and won’t pick up, moment to moment.)

Just to plug the rest of the bill for a moment here: I was in real good company as a Crossword Con speaker. Laura Braunstein gave a talk that had all my archivist friends buzzing, rallying constructors to back up and preserve their digital crossword ephemera. Natan Last read a passage from his upcoming book that I think really got at something essential about streak psychology — that part didn’t stream, but go ahead and pre-order his book if the phrase “streak psychology” got your gears turning. Natan’s Q&A with fellow crossword book writer Adrienne Raphel is a great example of how deep an interview can go when both sides of it know each other very well. Evan Birnholz makes diabolical yet approachable puzzles for the Washington Post on Sundays, and his talk made me realize there are times when it’s actually fun to explain a magic trick. The closing panel about the realities of constructing crosswords for money exclusively, and how people make it work is the kind of cross-sectional analysis that’s really essential as a form evolves… plus it was end-to-end full of brilliant people talking shit.

Last, and actually first, because she kicked the conference off with it, Brooke’s brief essay at the top of the conference articulated a lot of the careful thought that’s made Puzzmo into such an inspiring example of what’s possible in editorial games. Give it all a watch, it’s a brisk program! (Shoutout to a whole-ass conference that can be done before lunch.) Thanks again for having me!