Crossword themes

[rhu]

One 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?

Comments

[jangler-npl.livejournal.com]

I'm still a bit early in the game to be answering this sort of question, but as long as I've been themestorming, I always save my twofers. I have a few still lingering from my earliest days of thinking about this stuff...but every now and then (mostly then) I find a third for something, and it always makes me happy I kept 'em.