A weekly meta crossword on the forum started by member Josh (aka madhatter5). These puzzles are often very creative with solving mechanisms out of the norm and skewing towards the more challenging. Puzzles are posted every Wednesday, and the solution appears the following Tuesday.
Bummer. I was perfectly content in my rabbit-hole in some other corner of the meta-verse on this one. Even looked at the nudges and thought, "Yep, did that, did that...what am I missing?"
I wasn't taking the SPINNING TALES prompt literally enough. I found 6 "tales" (films, novels, etc.) in the clues and was trying to anagram their grid entries assuming I'd find works by a particular author, or maybe an author's name itself. I even had some confirmation in that one of the two-letter entries (NW and SE corners) was used...just the wrong one.
Cool puzzle @madhatter5! Wish I had my cryptic hat on a little tighter.
Last edited by joequavis on Tue May 18, 2021 5:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Ugh. I got that SPINNING meant to anagram, but then I saw that the long answers were all two words, and I took TALES to mean "the second word of a two-word answer." That led me down the rabbit hole of trying to anagram GREENS, LENNON, CAR, and FUEGO into something meaningful (spoiler: you can't). And then I looked for other multiple-word answers and ended up with a pile of them.
B lue greens (Teals)
R ock (Slate)
O ld (Stale)
N ick (Steal)
T iniest (Least)
A rmored CAR (Tesla)
The Bronta sisters (Masha, Sasha, and Kasha). Their many books, such as the one about the ditzy Indian girl (Jain Airhead), soared to withering heights on the best-seller list. Their oeuvre was of such large and diverse word-choice that it became the basis for a source for synonyms, now known as the Brontasaurus.