#704 - “Ghostwriter”

[Orsys]

Stumbled along but finally got it.

[Bird Lives]

I was so close -- right church -- but needed a nudge to get me into the right pew.

[Schmeel]

Beam me up.
It took a while, but I figured it out.

[SusieG]

It must be an easy week 4 . . . I solved it without help. I enjoyed it, though!

[MikeM000]

*sitting down, catching my breath*

Wow, that was a fun one. One small nudge to direct me away from a rabbit hole, and a whole lot of thinking.

222! Beamed....

[Thurman8er]

WOW!

Amazing puzzle. Beam me right up!

[KayW]

Finally!

[JennyByrd]

I got step one quickly on Friday - just an hour or so in. Still hunting for step 2.

[ajs0031]

Got step 1 after staring for a while, but I could use a nudge on the next step

[higgysue]

Beamed up after an assist from @Sara Dacus. Really fun puzzle!

[ajk]

Beamed up after a friendly nudge, without which I was spinning my wheels for several days.

[Joe Ross]

Another recent puzzle I've made too complicated. It's past time to heed standard advice to keep it simple, work the basics, stop playing Boggle with the grid, follow the prompts.

In any case, energize.

[mntlblok]

Just read the crossword fiend. Pretty cool.

[MikeM000]

I spent a day and a half seeing a word inside TERRYFRIDMAN and typing whatever letters were left into an anagram generator. There's about a million words you can make in ol' Terry's Boggle grid of a name, but very few sets that take up all 12 letters. The 2 best I came up with were FRIEND/MARTYR (we all have one of those, eh?) - Joon also found this one - and TRENDY R.I. FARM ("Where America's finest artisanal cranberries are born. Not grown...born.") I finally reached out for a nudge and once I was told to stay off the anagram path things slowly but surely fell into place. Solving in Alphacross wasn't conducive to it, but bringing up the PDF and having 6, 61, and 64 Across right next to one another at the top of the page definitely helped.

[sharkicicles]

I didn't get this one but am in awe at yet another unique mechanism from Gaffney. I never got past the first rabbit hole I went down.

[ajk]

So now I see where my disconnect was. It hadn't occurred to me that I could actually guess the real constructor's name, which seems dumb in retrospect because I knew pretty early on it was Matt. So I was trying to turn the 7 clues into random other words that would clue the existing entries, instead of (duh!) swapping the initials. Even after I was steered toward finding the 'correct' initials I brute forced the discovery of M and g and didn't get why of course it's those two until I read Joon's writeup. But even with that more roundabout route to the right initials it didn't take very long to get to the end post nudge. And indeed, fun.

[Bird Lives]

It's all so obvious in retrospect. If the initials TF are fake, the real author must be Matt Gaffney. So change TF in the clues to MG and look for entries that fit the seven new clues.
.

[Dannyvee]

I initially saw the PBs crossing in the center of the grid and thought we were going to learn that Patrick Berry was the ghostwriter.

[BarbaraK]

Memories of Marie Kelly had me assuming that Terry Fridman was an anagram. When I didn’t get anywhere with decoding that (using a web anagram solver since I don’t enjoy and am terrible at anagrams) I tried the apparent theme answers. And out popped “used clothing” -> “include ghost”. Whoa - that must be important! Fortunately I couldn’t get anywhere and had to try another track.

[higgysue]

I just read Joon’s writeup. I totally missed Merry Gridman. That’s brilliant!