When I fenced in college I fenced with foils, so epee always annoys me.
The late comics column of the Baltimore Alternate paper had an oreo watch, giving the clue for oreo showing up that week in either the NY Times crossword or the Sun.
Esne. Not so much that it is common, but that crosswords are the only place this word is EVER used. How often do you need a word for “Anglo-Saxon slave”?
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IIJM, or is this thread attracting an unusually high percentage of Charter Members? And why, do you suppose?
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Their brains are more advanced. Naturally.
For the record, I don’t even know how one becomes a charter member. I just wanted to make that seriously unfunny joke.
Heh. Charter members are simply folks who joined when we first went subscription, the vast majority of whom had been members of the boards for a year or more before that.
My stupid joke, proven true. Thanks.
There’s also the oft used Gt. Lakes clue with the ‘HOMES’ answer.
Pot Opener? Ante
Fr. Holy Woman: Ste
Sp. Ms.: Srta
Okay, people – I hadn’t forgotten my promise to review your clue-writing auditions, but I’ve been ridiculously busy IRL the last few days – and when I do get online, someone will IM me wanting to hear about the latest developments in the IRL stuff. (I’m up for a non-puzzle job that I really, really want and, I think [crosses fingers], that I have a really good shot at.)
So – here I am, let’s take a look at what you came up with:
Nice work – you definitely have potential. You’d need a little work on appropriate phrasing and conventions – it’s not legal to do a compound word thing as a fill-in the blank, as you do in Easy 13 – and I’d remind you of the importance of fact-checking – take another look at Easy 6. Your mediums are good – though I think Medium 14 is too hard, and I don’t think Medium 3 is factually accurate (not all constellations have 88 stars). My one beef is with your written-out acronyms – Medium 6, Medium 8 – not a legal move in any but the easiest xws, and these acronyms are too hard for easy xws.
Your hards – a few phrasing things – and a couple are just too hard – I have zero idea what 12 and 15 mean.
Since I do give a bit more blah-blah before setting the person down for the exercise, let’s assume some of these wouldn’t have happened – a very solid first effort. Ya done good.
A nice start – now go write 41 more, before I make you do pushups. 
Good start – but I’d disagree on your difficulty levels. “Easy” really means “easy” – as in, the answer should come with almost Pavlovian immediacy. These aren’t particularly hard – but I’d want you to rephrase them twice, once to make it a true “easy” and once to make it a true “medium.” Again, we would have had a conversations before you started, so I don’t think this is insurmountable. “Moroccan flag feature” is nice – but hard, most people wouldn’t know what the Moroccan flag looks like even if they stop and think about it.
I like your phrasing, and you clearly have a gift for wordplay – I’d be very pleased with a full set of 50 from you, I think.
You’re way off on difficulty levels – “Stelliform object” is no way in hell an easy clue, and neither is “Eight shifted” – I’d call the first medium and the second hard. I don’t know what “Bell-LaPadula property” means, meaning it’s beyond hard. Good creativity, but you’d need serious work on the difficulty thing. Good hard clues are actually easier to write than good easy clues, but an editor needs to be able to gauge difficulty very precisely – it’s just as much of a problem to drop a too-hard clue into an easy puzzle as it is to drop a too-easy clue into a hard puzzle.
Very nice job! I’d move some of your easies to medium, and some of your mediums to hard – and, alas, you can’t do cryptic clues in a regular xw, so some of the hards would have to be tossed – but this is some nice stuff.
All very nice!
Well, first of all, twickster, thank you for taking the time to assess what turned out to be a fun exercise. I suspect I had a much easier time than others who followed me since I didn’t have to worry about duplicating clues.
EASY. #6. D’oh! See, this is why I always try get someone else to fact check my work. I tend to miss simple stuff like this.
MEDIUM. I agree the written-out acronyms were wonky. But I wanted to work at least one medium-to-easy comic book reference into all these clues, and S.T.A.R. Labs was irresistable. (I should have used “Krypton’s was red.” :smack: Oh, well.) “Barnard’s Star” might be too hard, but I would need to have someone else point that out to me. My uncle Bernard got into astronomy briefly after he heard he had a star named after him and we used to climb out on the roof and search for it, and Will Eisner’s “Life On Another Planet” is about Earth’s attempts to colonize a planet near Barnard’s Star, so it’s always been pretty memorable name for me. I always thought “88 stars” is sort of a default definition of “constellation.”
I have only ever intuited crossword puzzle conventions over the years, so the fact I evidentally mucked that up only a few times makes me smile and go, Hey.
HARD. What? They were supposed to be hard! I figured any wannabe astronomers or science fiction buffs with a passing familiarality with the 50 closest stars to our solar system might recognize some of their names, like Kapetyn’s Star, Tau Ceti, Groombridge 34 (which I misspelled earlier… Sigh.) Since the clues are MUCH harder than the actual answer, (my logic being it’s not THAT hard to guess at S-T-A-R in a crossword once you’ve started filling in the blanks around it) I figured I could make some of them REALLY obscure. Guessed wrong, eh?
Anyway, twickster. Good luck with getting the new job.
P.S. I’d love another word. This was fun.
Also, what are some ways to hone your skills constructing crossword puzzles?
I see others have already posted nene (a Hawaiian goose).
I offer these old saws familiar to crossword puzzle solvers:
A newt: eft
Hindu or Asian nurse: amah
Towards shore: alee
Cutting tool: adze
Another word? Okay – I’ll start a new thread, instead of continuing to hijack this one. And I’ll put in some “intro-to-cluing” blah-blah in the OP, instead of just throwing y’all in the deep end without a life preserver. (I know I’ve got some stuff on my machine at work, so I’ll look for that tomorrow.)
In the meantime – there are two completely separate skills involved in creating a good crossword: One is constructing the grid, and the other is writing clues. Writing clues is more or less teachable – we are proceeding with said tutorial – but constructing a grid is all about practice. I’m real good at writing – and rewriting – grids, but I’ve also been doing it for a long freakin’ time (14 years). It’s about having a mental inventory of three-, four-, and five-letter words for filler – and the ability to take another look at your crosses and see if you can improve them.
For instance, say in your upper-right-hand corner, you have
T O T
A R E
N O N S E N S E … (theme entry connecting to the rest of the grid, so you’re stuck with the “NON” in those three spots.
tot, tan, ten – yawnnnnn…
okay, you can change the TOT to FEZ (nice juicy word you don’t see in every freakin’ puzzle), and tweak a couple of things to end up with …
F E Z
A G E
N O N S E N S E …
That’s the difference between good constructing and just throwing in the first thing that works. Letters that have higher point values in Scrabble are almost always a better choice. A lot of the words that are showing up in this thread as “damn I’m tired of seeing that word” don’t really need to be in the grid – they’re a sign of lazy construction.
Don’t forget the architects Jones (Inigo) and Saarinen (Eero).
Or the Carolina college (Elon).
Or those really fast airplanes (SSTs).
Or the actress Ward (Sela).
Or those Indians (Utes).
Or what twickster does (edit). 
Cruciverbialists the world over rejoiced when the last pre-Franco King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, married Queen Ena. They haven’t let her out of their sights since.
I haven’t constructed crosswords in several years now, but I used to publish several each year.
I guarantee, puzzle constructors did cartwheels when Evo Morales was elected President of Bolivia! A name like that is a godsend.
Pretty much ANY three, 4 or 5 letter word in which consonants alternate with vowels will be used constantly.
Livy’s Road–ITER
JFK arrivals (past)–SSTS
And one I never encounter outside of crossword puzzles: Cowboy movie–OATER