Hi friends!

My latest crossword publication posted this past Monday on Defector.com. Defector is a sports blog, but their readership has really gotten into doing crosswords and so they publish themed and themeless crosswords weekly. The themeli run about once a month from my understanding, at the end of the month. It’s paywalled but worth the subscription just for the fun crosswords. Spoilers and solution below!

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About this puzzle: it has exactly the same grid structure as my NYT debut in June. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? I like this grid because you get to fit 2 nice stacks of 8-letter entries in the NW and SE, and I also always enjoy a longer stack in the middle. DIGITAL NOMADS was, unsurprisingly, my seed entry–the one I put into the grid first, then planned the rest of the fill around it. In the post-pandemic, remote-work era, it feels very relevant. I’ve had friends work from all over the world in fully remote jobs. They often can work during the day (or part of the day, hehe), then use the nights and weekends to explore. The title, “Out of Office Again” is a nod to this entry, and to my first Defector puzzle, which was titled “Out of Office.” That title referred to the puzzle’s entry, WORK LIFE BALANCE, which actually was not the seed entry—LOWKEY FLEX was! I guess I am just obsessed with work or something!

Some notes on my favorite entries and features of the new puzzle:

• A lot of commenters noted that DIACRITIC fit in the same spot as DIAERESIS. This was totally unintentional, but I love it! A misdirection clue is one thing, but a misdirection entry is next-level. I do want my puzzles to be fair, so maybe we could’ve eased the surrounding cluing in that area, but I will say I wanted the hardest, cleverest clue possible for Miss ‘RESIS herself and I love how it came out. Full disclosure, I didn’t fully know what a DIAERESIS was before making this puzzle. I knew it was a lexical feature, but I think I thought that the double dots were always called an “umlaut.” When an entry fits that’s unknown to me, I usually favor deleting and reworking the area. However, I make exceptions for items I find really interesting, especially if they come with a neat clue, and this was exactly that!
• A crossword-constructing friend mentioned that  he was stuck on having TURTLE at the end of GIANT TORTOISE–check out his review here on Diary of a Crossword Fiend! The clue (“It moves slowly in the Galapagos or the Seychelles”) is of editor Hoang-Kim Vu’s making, and I love it. My submitted clues were about how it takes 5 hours to walk a mile or something. 
• MESCALINE and SPACE CASE were also two favorite entries of mine. I loved that the clue for the latter had a dirty ring to it (“Big nut?), although when I thought about it a little more, it might have been a stretch. A big nut is probably more of a clinically insane person, whereas a space case might just be forgetful. I think nut is roomy enough to connote an inattentive sort, though!

The one thing about Defector that is a little bit of an obstacle is that it is indeed behind a paywall. But it’s only like $5 for a 3-month subscription, so it’s a low barrier I would say!