Closing the Book.

[tablesaw]

It's hard to think of things to do artistically when people are bombing you.

—Royd Climenhaga

That's the inscription in the book I have in front of me. It's a note I took during a class while I was attending the National High School Institute for Theatre. I'm not sure what the class was—Performance Theory sounds about right—but the point is that I had that book in front of me in the summer of 1995. In fact, I believe I bought it just before flying to Chicago.

The book is Random House Cryptic Crosswords: Volume 2. And today, over thirteen years later, I filled in the last clue.

To be fair, I didn't work on it consistently for those thirteen years; most of the time it was lost under a pile of other books and papers. But every once in a while, I'd find it, yank it out, and keep working on it. The last time I noticed it, I flipped through that there were only a few incomplete puzzles, so I began working on them. I also went to the books to fill in lingering clues on almost-finished puzzles (which were generally words I did not know). Today, I burned through the puzzle that had been the most daunting puzzle New Word Order, by Harth, where the words of the clue were haphazardly scrambled.

I'm generally more likely to misplace a puzzle book than to complete it, so this is a pretty big deal for me. It's given me a lot of good solving in the past decade plus, but I'm glad to know it's finished.

FriNYTX: 22; FriLATX: 11:30.

Comments

[cramerica.livejournal.com]

I felt the same way on completing the NPL cryptics book.

[tablesaw]

I doubt I'll ever finish that one, simply because I can recall a number of them and I'm not compelled to re-solve them.

Still, I keep putting off solving Connect the Dots since it seems like a bit of an operation to pull off.

[cramerica.livejournal.com]

The dots one was the last one I solved (mainly because I'd misread the instructions and made it even harder than it was). Definitely worth it, though.