Wrap-up: The Making Of The Cryptic Cat strikes again!

This is not a solution to the puzzle, but provides notes from its poser. This type of answer has been approved by the community.

Caution: This post contains ALL the spoilers.

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Inspiration

I like variety crosswords grids. In a previous post I tried out a new kind, called Marching Bands, where the words went in circles and lines. That one had such good reception that I decided to make another. There would be a gimmick (I love gimmicks - see earlier note on variety crosswords), and I decided that I wanted to work in cryptic clues somehow.

Creative steps

Now I had to figure how exactly to incorporate cryptics into a Marching Bands. My thought process went exactly as the "conversation" between me and the Cryptic Cat is written at the start of the question. Since the phrase I wanted to clue had 2 words, I split the crossword into two grids. An obvious extra gimmick now was to mix the clues for the grids up.

Logistical steps

I worked on this puzzle in 4 sections: making the first grid, making the second grid, cluing the grids, and formatting. Note that all the pictures in this section are taken from my Google Sheet's version history. I also haven't pictured the completed grids, as you can see them in the Resources section.

Making the first grid

First, I had to choose which word of my final phrase (GREEN CHECKS) this grid would have a cryptic clue for. I went with CHECKS because it was an obvious ddef. Google was my friend here - I took some of its suggested synonyms as inspiration. I tried various words, but I kept having problems with E1 having a legal word with 4 out of 8 letters forced. Below is an example where I finally got a legal E1, but I didn't think the first row could feasibly end in an F.

After confirmation in chat that padding with an adjective was legal, I played around with various synonyms for each of my words until I landed on a set with a decent surface and the right number of letters.

As the first step of making a Marching Bands, I played around with various 4-letter words starting with B which themselves started longer words. Eventually I found 4 words that worked for the first row's Marchers and the first two A Bands words. I worked my way down a few Bands' top rows, then resolved the section in the middle-right of the grid. I dropped ICE HOCKEY at this point as a word to build off. On the left side of the grid I dropped VAN GOGH. I got sooo close to completing, and then... disaster. Awhile back I had accidentally changed one of my "locked-in" letters that was meant for the cryptic clue.

I've screenshotted the mistake-grid as an example of how you can get quite into a grid with a mistake. In the forth row, the I in IRON has to be an O to allow CONTROLS. Here you can also see my marking system in action. Blue = start of a Bands word, orange = start of a Marchers word.

This resulted in much cursing, followed by deleting a bunch of work and re-gridding. This time I managed to close off the grid, using much of the same techniques.

Making the second grid

This cryptic clue took so long to make. I mean so long. First I had to figure out how to clue GREEN. My initial idea was extracting from G?R?E?E?N, or something of the like. I couldn't find any phrases that worked - one day down the drain! Then I spent several days trying different combinations of charades - GR + E + EN, G(RE)EN, etc. When I finally hit upon the idea to do G + RE + EN, it still took a day of fiddling.

I did the same starting-a-Marching-Bands steps outlined above. I worked down around the right, then down the left, then across the bottom… and then I got stuck. And I mean stuck. After 3 days of making no progress, and seeing letters float behind my eyelids, I took a cooling-off period. A solid week of not gridding.

Above you can see where I got stuck. When I came back, I decided to do the unthinkable: completely start over. I deleted all of my work on the second grid, deleted my cryptic clue, and started making another. Before, I hadn’t considered reversals, so I put on in this time - GRE + EN<. I was fairly satisfied with the surface (I mean, it wasn’t great, but I took the 20-letter limit into account.) Time to re-grid!

What surprised me was how quick this grid came together. I had a very few dead ends. The parts of C1 and D1 I would need to use for those row’s initial Marchers were common word endings - I didn’t have to worry about that side too much! Though this time around I wasn’t able to fit as many long words in, all the ones I put in were at least decent. I did make a mistake in the bottom-right corner, but I’ll cover that later in this post (see Evolution).

Making the clues

First I copied all the words from the grids into neat little columns in my Google Sheet. Then I checked that they were all spelled correctly from the grid. Then I checked again. Once I was fairly confident that I had the right words, I started cluing. I mostly just worked down my columns, but I skipped some words that were harder to clue for later. Then I checked each clue for part-of-speech/pluralization mismatches. Then I checked for correct spelling again. Then I checked the clues for mismatches again. I’m noting all of these double-checks here to make it more clear how silly I felt when Deus pointed out the corner mistake.

Formatting

I drafted out an approximate story in a Google Doc. then started copy-pasting my clues over. I decided the spacing I wanted, what I wanted bold or italicized, the format my numbers would be in… there’s a lot of choices when formatting clues! This was also the step that I randomized clue order, by generating a random sequence of 1s and 2s to determine which grid’s clues came first. Then I doubled-checked all the clues again, copied the draft into PSE’s “Ask Question”, looked over for formatting… and hit Post!

Resources

For tracking the growing grids and clues, I had a massive Google Sheet. Below is a zoomed-out picture of the final grid (with the corner inconsistency still in). Note that not all the clues are pictured, as they went for quite a bit off the bottom of the screen.

For forcing the cryptics to be the proper length, I used Thesaurus.com and Wikipedia's list of charade clues.

For gridding, I used onelook for finding words that would fit. I often had multiple onelook windows up at the same time, cross-referencing possibilities to see if any would work together.

For creating the crosswords clues, I used wordplay.com's answer-clue lookup to get ideas for clues.

Evolution

Deusovi found an error in the corner of the puzzle. If you look at the Google Sheet, in the bottom-right corner of the top grid the word "ALIEC" appears. I had meant for this to be "ALICE". Somehow, this typo survived 3 separate rounds of double-checking. I took his suggestion to re-grid with ALIEN and shifted around the necessary words. The new 11B for that area is one I wouldn't use normally (too science-y), but desperate times called for desperate measures. Yes, I'm calling a small error in a crossword grid a "desperate time" :P.

I also messed up on the direction to read the cryptics in - they go /, not /, as the original post said.

Your thoughts/mental process

Below is an approximate transcript of my thoughts

THIS IS SO HARD WHY AM I EVEN TRYING
...oh wait if I use these words, then that area is resolved.
Okay, let's put a long word here to build off
AHH THERE ARE NO LONG WORDS THAT WORK
Oh no, I changed one of the cryptic clue letters... have to re-grid that whole area
What if I run a word here?
This word and this word and this word work together, but then that word’s ending doesn’t work… AHH WHY IS THIS SO HARD

And repeat.

_{I may have taken this suggested heading a bit too literally}

Takeaway

My main takeaway from this puzzle is that working under tight constraints can be fun... once you get past the problems that those constraints offer. When I finally 20-letter cryptic clues that were both valid and allowed for clue-able E1s, there was much rejoicing. The long time period spent messing with the cryptics before that? Much head-banging.

Another important practice when working with large puzzles is carefully tracking what is done so far. I did this with color-coded grid cells (as you can see above).

To avoid making mistakes with large puzzles I highly recommend getting a test-solver. I don’t know anyone willing to test-solve my crosswords, but they would’ve caught my errors.

And of course, the most important factor in making a large puzzle: when you get stuck, take a break. My brain was just unable to work on the old grid #2, so I changed the grid. We care more about quality than the number of puzzles per (insert arbitrary time unit).

I would suggest that if anyone wants to make a puzzle with extracted cryptic clues, that using an extraction mechanism with a more flexible letter count is a good thing. There was much hardship in this puzzle associated just with forcing cryptics to conform to my 20-letters-long constraint.

Plus, Deusovi pointed out how some of my clues were a weensy (read: lot) illegal