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.

Puzzle Seventy-Three: Returns Department (midi)

Hey everyone, the blog has returned after a couple of weeks of absence caused by my being locked out of my domain name registration company's account, making it impossible to renew the domain name after it expired. 

Last month's contest meta, "Wide Body," proved challenging, and I never really enforced a deadline to the contest, because the blog went down before the deadline. 

If you're a faithful follower of the contest meta, you'll know that I post the solutions in the Lexicon Devil subforum of the XWord-Muggles forum, because, to be blunt, it's easier to do there. But I wasn't able to do that for quite some time because I couldn't get access to *that* account either. Now that issue's fixed too. Hopefully everything is on track once again. In the meantime:

.puz / PDF

Puzzle Seventy-Two: Wide Body (meta)

 

image from mentalhealth.org.uk

Today is my anniversary. My wife's a writer, and this puzzle is an oblique tribute to some of her work. I'll explain once the contest is over...

The meta answer is a three-word place name.

Submit answers at the Google Forms or Crosshare link below before 12 PM EST, Wednesday, August 23 at 12 PM EST:

https://forms.gle/EiX5oXMpNbkCRe5h8 

.puz / PDF / Crosshare

Puzzle Seventy-One: Taste of Chaos

Apologies for the lengthy delay in posting a new puzzle. A lot of crossword-related things have had to go on the back burner since March, including the meta contest puzzles, which will hopefully return. My most recent contest meta can be found in the Contest Crosswords Combating Cancer puzzle pack. 

Fireball Crosswords was kind enough to publish a puzzle of mine on June 28. It's a subscription service so I can't share a link but if you subscribe, hopefully you enjoyed it.

I suspect someone beat me to the punch with the theme for this week's puzzle, but such things happen.

 .puz / PDF

Puzzle Seventy: Support Staffs (themeless)

This is my contribution to the ACPT puzzle table. I'll be attending for the first time, so say hi if you see me.

.puz / PDF

Puzzle Sixty-Nine: Sticks Up For Birds (freestyle) (Enigmarch Day 2) + Bonus Puzzle: Enigmarch Day 1

Enigmarch begins again. Today's freestyle is for Day 2 and the prompt... Well, I put the prompt in the puzzle as an entry. You can figure it out pretty easily. 

.puz / PDF

(Yes, I know today is March 3rd. I ran out of time to post this yesterday.)

I'm going to be posting my #Enigmarch puzzles in this thread on XWordMuggles. 

Scroll down once you're done for my Day 1 mini-meta puzzle - for the prompt KEY.