Hey folks,

My apologies, but I have to postpone publication of my latest puzzle until sometime later tonight. I hesitate to put an exact time down because I don’t want to set the schedule, and then have some other complication come up. One of my excuses is that I was a groomsman at a friend’s wedding yesterday, and got really busy with the rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner, and the actual wedding. Another excuse has to deal with the puzzle itself, and while I don’t want to spoil anything, let’s just say it was…..not the easiest crossword to put together.

In the meantime, here are some other items of note:

1) I wrote today’s New York Times puzzle. Hope you enjoy it! It sucks that I couldn’t have Puzzle #61 ready at the same time, but well, see Excuses above.

2) The talented artist Hayley Gold created a comic for my NYT puzzle — that is seriously cool. She’s got a great sense of humor and does great drawings to boot. Obviously, you should solve the puzzle first so as not to get spoilers.

Speaking of Hayley, she has an important announcement: she used to receive advance copies of the NYT puzzle early enough so that she could publish her comic on the same day of crossword publication. That is no longer the case, and so any NYT comics she creates will be published on a week-long delay by necessity. Personally, I think her creativity and steady dedication to her comics warrants her being able to see the puzzles early when a couple of other puzzle blogs receive advance copies themselves. But my opinions aside, she has a new plan that she’d like to try out:

First, the delayed comics will be coming out every Sunday/Monday starting the 2nd week in September, where she’ll choose the puzzle herself and will still be a free comic. For a fee, she will allow readers to choose the puzzle from the past week for which they want her to create a comic.  If you’d like Hayley to do a comic on a classic or indie puzzle, it can be done as a commission.  Finally, Hayley asks that everyone give the new format a chance and give her feed back via email (kakumei@verizon.net) to let her know if they feel it still works. I highly recommend supporting her in whatever way you can.

That’s all for now. Again, I’m sorry for being late this time on my Devil Cross puzzle. I’ll try to get it up as soon as I can.

Update I, 8/29/15 @ 11:40 pm ET: Still working on it, friends. The clues are finished, but it still needs typesetting. My guess is sometime early Sunday morning will be a more realistic posting time. Again, I’m sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience. 

Update II, 8/30/15 @ 10 am ET: Almost done — just writing up the blog post. Thanks so much for bearing with me.