Puzzle Seventy-Five: October Quartet (midi-meta)

I can never resist doing a Halloween puzzle. If you're solving on November 1, just remember that the Halloween spirit lives in your heart all year long. You just have to believe in it.

Puzzle Seventy-Four: Fall Out (meta)

 A little screw-up this month: this puzzle went live on Crosshare last Thursday, and was supposed to go out to list subscribers and appear on the blog at the same time, but other things intervened.

For efficiency's sake, please use the Crosshare solver below to view the meta prompt and submit answers as well as download .puz and PDF files. 

And I wanted to extend the deadline, but the answer is set to become public on Crosshare at midnight on Wednesday night, and I can't figure out a way to change that setting! 

So hopefully you can get this one by the above deadline. But if you want to email me before Sunday, promising that you didn't reveal the meta answer until you got it right, I'll try to get you in the running.

I do want to note that I have had serious time limitations on construction this year, and metas are harder to construct than regular puzzles. I have a backlog of standard puzzles to potentially post, but I can't promise I'm going to be posting monthly metas as I once did. I would really like to move into meta suites. I've been working on one for about a year. But those are HARD to put together. I'll keep you posted.

And keep your eyes peeled for my AVCX+ debut themeless sometime in the near future.