About The Gnomon
Hi, my name is Andy Yingst, and I've been loving cryptic crosswords for thirty or so years, and making them for about three. My cryptic work has appeared in AVCX, Out of Left Field, and The Wall Street Journal, and I'm a regular contributor to The Browser.
There are a good number of outlets for new American cryptic constructors to submit and publish regular cryptic crosswords, but for variety cryptics (that is, cryptics with an extra layer of trickery beyond the clues themselves) there are relatively few options. Games World of Puzzles magazine runs one new variety cryptic a month, as does the Wall Street Journal, and AVCX publish a few a year, but beyond that you need to start your own outlet, which many great constructors have done.
My goal in creating The Gnomon is to increase the number of high-quality American-style variety cryptic crosswords in the world by providing a platform for new and experienced constructors alike.
The goal for the first year will be to release a new issue containing about four puzzles, about every other month, for six bucks an issue.
If this sounds appealing to you as a solver, please sign up for our mailing list! There will be free previews in February and April, and if you like what you see, you can subscribe for more starting in June. And if you're a constructor interested in submitting, I'd love to hear from you! You can find a specification guide here.
Some Clarifications:
"About" four puzzles?
Not every variety cryptic is the same size or has the same depth, and a big goal here is variety in the varieties: I don't really want to dictate what size submissions we're willing to accept, so I want to give some wiggle room. One issue might have three extra-big puzzles, and another might have five smaller ones. Each issue will aim to have at least around 150 clues, on the assumption that a 'typical' sized variety cryptic has around 35-40 clues, so about 4 times that much.
"About" every other month?
The goal is to release an issue exactly every other month, on the first of the even months of the year, starting June 1, 2025. I'm putting the 'about' on there to acknowledge uncertainty about how many submissions will come in, and also to improve my own mental health by setting clear expectations up front that it's not going to be a big deal if sometimes an issue is late or skipped. If you subscribe, you won't be charged for an issue until it comes out, and there will never be two issues closer than six weeks apart, so you'll never be charged more than six dollars in any six-week span. (Six weeks rather than two months so that if one issue is only a little late, the next one might be able to get back on schedule.)
Where do those six bucks go?
The money coming in will be going to web hosting, and to paying the constructors and editors, and for at least the first year, that means the constructors and editors who aren't me. For these first several issues, I'll be aiming to provide about half the puzzles per issue while subscriptions are growing. Hopefully after the first year or two there are enough submissions from other constructors--and enough subscriptions to pay for them--that I can step back and focus on editing.
It would probably be more marketable to structure it as "three dollars a month" rather than "six dollars every other month," but splitting it into fewer, chunkier payments helps a little on payment processing fees, meaning more of the money can go to the people making the puzzles, and might make selling back issues a little simpler later on.
Why 'The Gnomon'?
Boy, naming things is hard...
In July of 2023 I had a dream that there was a new variety cryptics outlet called The Gnomon. I spent a little time the last few months looking for a better name than that and never found something that stuck, so I guess my dreams get to come true this time. ('Gnomon' is a real word, by the way--it's the word for the stick on a sundial that casts the shadow. Dictionaries disagree about how to pronounce it: I've been saying NO-MOHN, though NO-muhn seems to be correct also.)
In a real sense though, this is kind of a terrible name: While UK variety cryptics often have very obscure vocabulary as one of their defining features, this is generally not the case for US cryptics: The Gnomon will typically be more interested in grids made of words and phrases from everyday life than dictionary fill. That is, please don't let the weird word in the name of the outlet scare you into thinking these puzzles will be full of weird words.
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