making_crossword_puzzles epitome of incomprehensibility When you have graph paper but find it too lined to be conducive to fiction writing, there's this. I don't know why I find making up crossword puzzles fun because it's also so frustrating. Funstrating? Not quite to the point of defenestration: you want to push it out a window but don't. The fun and frustration of it is that when you have too many blank spaces, there are way too many possibilities. When you only have a few letters to fill in, there are too few. In that way, it's a bit like writing fiction. The possibilities overwhelm at first and then narrow constrainingly. I've been working on Carol Winter Writes an Essay this week. David said I'd be revising chapter 3 for years. Well, this will show him: I'm revising chapter 2 now. I wrote him a custom_crossword_puzzle once. I'm still unreasonably proud of one of my clues. 260621 ... e_o_i Oh yes, and sometimes (read: almost always) you have to change some of the first words you put down. "Heresy" required another word that started "ref" to end in "h", so I came up with "refetch" (I did google its wordiness and it's used at least in programming). My heretical mind sticks out its grey slop at AI - which could, admittedly, do crossword-arranging much quicker. 260621 ... raze i'm almost sure i tried this once. the trouble was i constructed the grid before i knew which words were going to glue it together. the whole thing fell apart when i tried to reverse engineer the puzzle, necessitating nonsense to fill in the gaps. i must have looked at the mess of what i made at some point and thought, "this is a pretty apt metaphor for my entire life." that's if it really happened and it isn't a false_memory. with the shabby state of this short-circuiting brain, it's hard to say one way or the other. 260621 what's it to you? who go blather from