I had a lot of theme ideas that I thought were pretty funny that I'd been saving in case I ever got a regular gig - and the chance finally came in 1985 when the San Francisco Examiner needed a puzzlemaker for a new Sunday magazine called Image. Plus I felt that I'd finally learned enough about the solving public to make a go of it in newspapers, which was where the vast majority of solvers were anyway. (who is now a TV producer) said, "you know, millions of people are trying to work in TV and movies but very few people are trying to make a career out of crosswords, and making crosswords is something you seem to have been born to do." And to be honest, there were two definite down sides to freelancing - you had to sell all rights, and you had to make lots and lots of puzzles in order to make decent money, and making lots of puzzles was more work than fun. ![]() At first I was not thinking of making a living at crosswords - I was writing for TV game shows by day and working on film scripts by night and doing crosswords on the side. I got a great education from these experiences because of their different priorities - Dell and Margaret had a more conservative approach, and Games was trying to be more modern. I would fly into New York each year because of the crossword tournament but I would hang out at the Dell office and at Games and even had several two-hour lunches with Margaret in her 96th Street apartment just off Central Park. ![]() I was living in Santa Monica CA in the early 1980s and was making crosswords for a number of puzzle magazines, but mainly for Dell crosswords, Games magazine, and Margaret Farrar's Simon & Schuster books.
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