A Matter of Sophistication

First things first: new blog. I bought longy.fun as a joke for about £3. I think it was easily £3/year funny,  but the renewal was going to be £30. Not that funny. And it was all a little juvenile, too, so I’ve taken the opportunity of moving to longyfan.blogspot.com to have a refresh. I set out to create something with a touch of class . I’ve sincerely grown as a person thanks to the crossword community on Twitch and Discord, so to exactly reflect that, I’ve also added some original introductory content to support and, hopefully, expand our community. Please have a browse. --- Anyway, the puzzle . I discovered a little while ago that it makes a huge difference to work on fill properly before cluing. However, I then forgot all about that and left myself some hard clues to write. Meanwhile, I have started using Ingrid to make my grids, which I’ve found to be pretty great. It’s a limitation of MyCrossword that you can only pick from the pre-formed grids, and many of them aren’t grea...

Hello hello. New puzzle! Edited by Juff. Thank you, Juff. Thanks also to Skaldskaparmal for testing some of the clues in an earlier, unpublished puzzle. This time I learnt a little bit more about what makes a good grid – by making a slightly iffy one. Getting way out of my comfort zone, I was encouraged to hint at a very slight indirect reference to some popular culture on one clue. Next time, I might even try something more current than a 1960s television programme. https://www.mycrossword.co.uk/cryptic/1312

Here’s the latest! Thanks again to Juff for patient test solving and workshopping :) https://www.mycrossword.co.uk/cryptic/1294

Another puzzle! Massive thanks to Skaldskaparmal for the test solve. Incredibly grateful for the patience and generosity. However this puzzle turned out, it turned out better thanks to them. How did it turn out? I feel like my output's getting better with each puzzle, if only by a little. I'm certainly learning with every puzzle. A couple from Umpire and Liari that I've solved recently struck me with the flowing ease of the surfaces and the elegance of the deviously fair wordplay. My own clues betray the horrid knots I get myself tied in as I write them. The tortuous clunk of my technically viable clues stinks of how desperately I've tried to make my ideas work. So what to do? I decided to make things easier on myself – if I'm struggling less then perhaps the clues will lose some of their awkward tension. So I chose a grid on mycrossword with shorter words in it – you can see there are quite a lot of black squares – and tried my best to pick words susceptible of a n...

Hey, you! I made a new puzzle on mycrossword again. Again, it was “test solved” by Juff. “Test solved” means they solved, gave notes, discussed the notes at length, tolerated my arguing with the notes, politely and patiently convinced me to shut up and change the clue (most of the time), and suggested all the best bits now present in the puzzle. THANK YOU JUFF!! I’d like that text to show in flashing colours but dunno how so please just imagine it. Really garish. (It says “THANK YOU JUFF!!” in case you find it illegible.) Anyway, nothing else to say about the whole thing, really. CLICK LINK HERE ↓ Please click this link to visit my crossword at https://www.mycrossword.co.uk/cryptic/1239 CLICK LINK HERE ↑

I tried out mycrossword – to see what was going on with that . Pretty cool, it turns out. I liked the setting tools and especially the fact that it works so fluidly for cluing on a phone. I was a bit nervous about hitting publish because I felt like the site was for Serious Crossword People and I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. But with a little nudge from Juff, who tested, improved and basically rescued the puzzle from my marginal competence, I pushed the button. So it’s live. I have no idea if I can embed it so, for the first time, I’ve actually written something here. I’ll definitely use mycrossword again, in the hope that the pressure of public exposure will drive me to up my game. Many thanks to Juff. CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE LINK TO MY MYCROSSWORD CROSSWORD AT https://www.mycrossword.co.uk/cryptic/1218 THANKS!!

Please click this link for the boring version