Crossword themes
Jul. 18th, 2006 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuOne of these days I hope to have enough of a good theme to submit a puzzle for publication. Right now I have a list of themes that are one entry too few.
So a question to the published constructors out there: at a rough guesstimate, what fraction of your theme ideas do you end up having to toss because there are only two good entries, or you can come up with a 13, a 14, and a 15 but you can't force any two of them to be the same length?
I guess what I'm asking is: how do you decide it's time to give up on a theme? If it's been a while and I haven't been able to complete the set, is it because 70% of theme ideas just don't work or is it because I'm inexperienced? Should I start with the now-mundane simple letter-substitution (or -addition or -deletion) themes and work my way up to original and clever?
So a question to the published constructors out there: at a rough guesstimate, what fraction of your theme ideas do you end up having to toss because there are only two good entries, or you can come up with a 13, a 14, and a 15 but you can't force any two of them to be the same length?
I guess what I'm asking is: how do you decide it's time to give up on a theme? If it's been a while and I haven't been able to complete the set, is it because 70% of theme ideas just don't work or is it because I'm inexperienced? Should I start with the now-mundane simple letter-substitution (or -addition or -deletion) themes and work my way up to original and clever?