It's WIP Week on Chromatic Conflux! I searched through my metaphorical blog post vault and found seven projects that I'm proud of — but may never "finish." So I thought, why not just publish them?
I started writing today's post in July 2022, a year after I published the Puzzles for Progress book (as a tenth grader), to cover the story of its creation and convey why it got done four months later than I'd hoped. Seeing this post in my Drafts folder, and realizing that I didn't want to finish it but didn't want the prose to go to waste, was my inspiration for WIP Week. I added a couple asides in brackets and a substantial addendum at the end, including exclusive content for the book that was left on the cutting room floor. Enjoy!
As you may know, I made a puzzle book last year! [I can't believe it's now three years ago.] I've talked a bit about how it's organized, and its various components, but I don't think I've ever actually told the story of what making it was like. So I'm going to do that!
But first, a fact that I will not require you to read the entire blog post to learn: I formatted the Puzzles for Progress book in Google Slides.
I know. I'm crazy. But hear me out: all of my puzzles were formatted in Google Drawings, and I needed to be able to make a ton of small formatting changes within the book. Google Slides has the same commands, and I understood how they worked, so it was really the only rational option.
I mean, how is it different than a book formatting software, really? It's pretty easy to resize the slides to fit the dimensions of your book, and you can change all aspects of the layout. The only annoying thing is that there's not a great way to view page spreads. But it is possible! You go File > Print settings and preview > Handout - 2 slides per page. And you make sure to include a blank slide at the very beginning so the pages are on the correct sides. It's not perfect, but it works.
When I decided to make a book in Google Slides, my main reference was a Medium article describing the authors' experience creating a book in Slides. Their reason was that they had many collaborators on the book, and "creating multiple versions of InDesign documents is not only tedious, but also risky." Their conclusion was that Slides was a bit awkward, but due to their collaboration and tight deadline it was a solid option.
Shockingly, I was perfectly satisfied with Slides for my use case! My biggest complaint is probably the inability to quickly make things exactly the same on different slides, since when you're like me, you want the puzzle titles, blurbs, page numbers, etc. to be in precisely the same location on every page (even though no one will notice small differences), and sometimes this was frustrating.
Anyway. Now if that's all you wanted you can go. Time to talk about the idea.
The Idea
As I say in the book's introduction, I had the idea to make a puzzle book in 2020, but thought it sounded hard and started Puzzles for Progress, my puzzle site, instead. But when did I have the idea to compile the puzzles into a book?
The date was April 16, 2021, and I was folding laundry. While folding laundry, I watched a Cracking the Cryptic video featuring a sudoku called "Boxes," by Clover. The previous day, Simon had asked on Discord if anyone had any recommendations for easier puzzles, and Clover suggested "Boxes" right there. People in that world were always saying my puzzles were on the easier side (whereas people in the real world often found them harder — a fun contrast) and I wondered if maybe I could have gotten a puzzle on Cracking the Cryptic. What would be the intro pack to Puzzles for Progress? So I was thinking that for the one-year anniversary of Puzzles for Progress, on July 7, it would be cool to make a compilation pdf of some of the best puzzles I had made so far, arranged to be a good solving experience in order.
And then it occurred to me that I could compile the puzzles into a book instead of a pdf! It was clear to me that this would take work, but it seemed like a really cool idea, and people I talked to about it seemed enthusiastic. So I started work!
An interesting thing about this origin story is that the book does not really accomplish the original use case of getting my puzzles on Cracking the Cryptic. In fact, as I write this, my puzzles still have never been featured on Cracking the Cryptic, though to be fair I only emailed in a puzzle once, and they mostly focus on sudoku while I don't make a ton of sudoku. [They've still never featured me, although my Jack Lance post was linked in a video once.]
(My puzzles have, on the other hand, been featured on Scott Stro-solves, which has almost 75,000 subscribers, but it's ironic — at the time I was featured, he had less than a thousand, and his channel grew rapidly when the YouTube algorithm smiled upon his Wordle shorts. The growth has not translated into a ton of views for his older puzzle videos. Nevertheless, I of course take full and total credit for any and all increase in popularity of his channel.)
I announced the book on May 23, hoping for a release date of July 7, to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Puzzles for Progress. At least I had the self-awareness to say that the date was very tentative. (The book would ultimately release on November 3, which the astute among you is farther from the release date than the day I started working.)
The funniest thing about the delays is that they had almost nothing to do with the actual puzzle making: the puzzles were ready by July 7. Which I will now talk about.
The Puzzle Selection
The most important part of any puzzle book is, well, the puzzles. On day one, I went through my published puzzles and selected some of my favorites. Relatively soon, I was able to arrive at a set of 36 that I felt good about. My goal was to create six exclusive new puzzles for the book to bring the total count to 42, because is there anything truer?
My initial plan was to sort the book easy to hard, but to have three puzzles that I was really proud of at the very beginning. My thinking was that even if people didn't end up having time to finish the entire book, they would at least be able to do some good puzzles at the beginning. I seriously considered nominating some puzzles and having people vote on which ones they thought were the best of the best. I thought it was a bit much, though.
I had the idea of a best-of-the-best section for a long time, but at the end I removed it because I didn't want someone to stop doing the book because the puzzles were way too hard, and I also wasn't very confident that they were my best puzzles, or that it was a particularly meaningful thing to talk about.
I did think a lot about the right way to organize logic puzzles vs. word puzzles, which there were approximately a fifty-fifty split of. I thought about making them fully intermixed, I thought about fully dividing the book, but ultimately I went with a compromise: the book would alternate between sections of word and logic puzzles. (It goes Easier Logic, Easier Word, Medium Logic, Medium Word, Harder Logic, Harder Word.) I didn't want to interrupt people's flow solving a particular puzzle, but I also wanted to try to give someone solving in order a flavor of the different kinds of puzzles relatively early.
The Puzzle Creation
At the time I was still making three puzzles a week for Puzzles for Progress itself. But it was the good old days, when I kept a backlog instead of writing puzzles the day before, and also didn't have as much puzzler's block as I do now. I had drafted Issue #53, the last before the book's original release date, on May 22. This gave me ample time to work on the exclusives, the last of which I made on June 19.
Now, with under a month remaining, since the final files have to be submitted two weeks earlier, it wasn't close enough to practically make the July 7 time. Especially since I wanted a test copy. But still, I felt well on my way. The hard work was done.
Now, I know, four months isn't that much in the grand scheme of things. But it really felt like a lot to me, and it's a reminder that big projects like this are a commitment.
There's a saying that really resonated with me while finishing up this book: the first 90% of work on a project takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% of work accounts for the other 90%.
So what was the remaining ten-slash-ninety percent?
The Front Cover
Interestingly, with my front cover, I mostly just went with my original concept and tweaked it a bit, even though I did ask various people for feedback. That's not entirely fair — I made a lot of subtle changes — but ... well, I'll show you. Here were my front covers at different points in time:
My very first idea was not what I ended up going with, but my June 4 idea was really quite close to my ultimate design, and my June 6 version has all the design elements. (The exact shade, and the exact text, I kept tweaking.) The June 11 alternate has some changes that were suggested to me, such as shrinking the text and adding white lines at the top and bottom. I experimented with these various changes a lot, especially more moderate versions of them, but ultimately I just wanted the title to be large.
Why was the idea of a purple gradient (ombre) there from the beginning? I'm not sure exactly — Puzzles for Progress has always had a relatively newspapery-grayscale sort of aesthetic, but I guess I just always loved how it looked. Sort of astral, almost. In the final version, the gradient was toned down somewhat, so it's almost hard to tell that it's a gradient after all. But it's still there!
I will say that I was worried about the gradient not looking good in the physical version, because gradients often do not. Fortunately, this was not the case with my book, in which I think the gradient really translates!
The Back Cover
Then, of course, there was the back cover. For some reason, it occurred to me that I needed a back cover later than the front cover, so I didn't draft it until June 11. Here, tweaking the blurb was a pretty big deal, since it had a much more substantial one. I'm not going to put in a bunch of images of slightly different blurbs, though.
Again, the core structure was intact all the way through. I am quite proud of the dark purple outline around the light purple, which solved a problem I was having: I didn't want both the front and back to be dark purple, but I didn't want it to just awkwardly switch on the spine or something. Annoyingly, I think there ended up being some weirdness with me not leaving enough barcode space on the version for sale, which had a larger barcode than the personal copies I bought, that may have just made the entire back light purple. I think it should be fixed in new copies, though?
Looking at these covers does also remind me that I also am a strong believer in links being blue and underlined even when they are, in fact, on a paper book where no one is going to click them.
Also, the eagle-eyed among you may notice that the text on the June 11 version isn't quite standard Lorem Ipsum text, and the eagler-eyed among you may recognize where it comes from.
As you can see, my covers were basically done in June, bleeding into July, so they weren't really the holdup.
Addendum
And that's where my progress ended — I never got to the actual holdup. But I was planning to write sections called "The Formatting," "The Introduction," "The Interludes," "The Capriciousness of Barnes and Noble," and "The Book, Which Exists!"
I do remember the formatting being really annoying — although it's the kind of annoying that I can sit down and force myself to do, in a pinch. The writing — the introduction and interludes — took quite a long time. (I wonder if that's foreshadowing for anything.) And Barnes and Noble made things difficult: they cancelled everyone's preorders on them at one point. They took the book off sale on release day. And they often failed to complete manual review steps until I emailed them.
Anyway, it's unfortunate that I never described how I felt in those latter months of delay...
...or did I?
It was September 25, 2021, I was finishing up the book, and I wanted to vent. So I wrote this interlude to appear inside it:
Interlude: How I Made a Puzzle Book
I thought about including an interlude in this book about how I make a puzzle. But I don’t really have a super satisfying thing to say. I could get into the nuts and bolts, talk about how I often make puzzles on a whiteboard, though I’m more and more making them on the computer now, on sites like puzz.link and f-puzzles. I could talk about general technique among puzzle creators, like how for logic puzzles you don’t start with an answer and work backwards, instead you add clues that you think are interesting, one by one, solving as you go. I could talk about general goals, like figuring out what makes a puzzle fun and adding it, trying to make a puzzle you would want to solve.
But, setting aside the fact that I just did (using the literary device of apophasis, where you mention something by saying you don’t want to mention it), what I actually want to write, now that it’s occurred to me, is about how I made this puzzle book, because it’s meta, and that’s enough to sell me on anything.
Anyway, I decided to use Barnes and Noble’s service to actually print the book. For the most part, they made things convenient, though I did notice that getting any of the manual approval steps was highly correlated with me emailing them.
I also had to lay out the book. I considered learning a service, like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, more specifically designed for this, but since my files were all in Google Drawings, and I knew what the tools did, I made this book in, yes, Google Slides. I know.
The real trouble wasn’t the puzzles. Most of the puzzles in the book are, of course, curated from Puzzles for Progress, so I’d already made them. Even the six exclusives I was able to create pretty quickly. The trouble was all the little things.
I had to design a front cover. I had to design a back cover. I had to lay out all the puzzles with standardized formatting that looks nice. I had to lay out all the answers. I had to write an introduction. I had to make a Table of Contents. I had to write the About the Author and the acknowledgements. I had to write these interludes. I had to fix the tiny errors no one else would notice, because I would. And I was of course juggling this with publishing actual Puzzles for Progress, along with various other life things.
I kind of burned out a bit. In May, I sent out an email to Puzzles for Progress subscribers announcing the book, committing to making it, and if I hadn’t done that, I might have given up sometime during the summer. I went a few months over the Puzzles for Progress anniversary I had wanted to release the book on, because everything takes longer than you think. But I couldn’t give up.
As I write this, the covers are done. The puzzles are mostly done, though the page numbers are all wrong and the word puzzle grids are all on the left side, instead of the right, which I think is less nice. The answers are done. The introduction is done. The Table of Contents will be done once I add in the correct page numbers. The About the Author is done and the acknowledgements should be quick to write. (Hopefully.) And all the interludes are done except this one.
But for you, of course, the whole book is done.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little tired of the book. But, just last week, I was able to see a physical test copy, and my excitement for the project was renewed. There’s something romantic (in the sense of idealized, idyllic) about the idea of solving a puzzle book while you’re lying at a beach, immediately having woken up on a weekend, or just on a couch in the middle of the day. I do plenty of computer solving, but there’s something special about paper solving.
I hope this book brings you the same joy it’s brought me to create!
Addendum to the Interlude
I cut it from the book (replacing it with a discussion of the origins of puzzles) because it was the wrong tone. I shouldn't be complaining about making a book inside the book itself. (Though maybe for the right project I would...that sort of complaining does feel like a Jacob Cohen thing to do.)
When I was first coming up with the idea for the puzzle book, and I discussed it with my dad on a walk, I told him about my real motivation for making a book. It wasn't about the first book, I said. Once I did this the first summer, I would have momentum to make a sequel the second summer, which would be better, and then I could do a book every year. I even planned out the colors of the first few covers — purple, then blue, then green, then golden. Maybe there'd be a silver book at some point.
I guess, if I was serious about that, it wasn't very strategic to title the book "Best of Puzzles for Progress." (I did consider naming it something like "Puzzles for Progress Anthology 2020-21," but that had the opposite problem, being weird if I didn't do a sequel.)
I do keep revisiting the idea of a second book in my mind. I have the content. And to me, it would feel like wrapping up the Puzzles for Progress project with a nice bow as I move into college. I've done some of the prep work. I've already made a book.
I started explaining how in this post!
But therein lies my hesitance.
~
...oh, before you go, I guess I do actually have one more piece of content for you! If you're curious about the nuts and bolts of puzzle creation, I found another section that I started writing for the book but then abandoned. It's a narrative of how I made the first two puzzles in the book. I considered making it its own WIP Week post, since it ruins my ending a bit and I couldn't think of a better place to put it here, but it's too short. Anyway, here it is!
Inspirations
A Too-Long Tale of the Origins of Every Puzzle in the Puzzles for Progress Book
Disclaimer: Here be spoilers. Solve the puzzles first!
Capsules (new)
Some puzzles take eternities to make. Others almost emerge, fully formed, from the womb. This puzzle was the latter. I knew I wanted to start off the book with an easier Capsules, to sort of introduce people to the genre. The real seed of the puzzle was the fact that this arrangement of cages fully resolves without a single given digit.
And the rest was just listening to the puzzle and hearing what it wanted. It took like 15 minutes. If only all puzzles were this easy to make.
(Interestingly, I ended up adding a given 3 in the pattern above, which is totally unnecessary from a logical point of view. I just thought it would smooth out the early solve a little bit.)
Capsules (Issue #33)
Here's something I've learned about Capsules puzzles: if you want to make a satisfying hard puzzle, use mostly 5-cell regions. If you want to make a satisfying easy puzzle, use mostly 4-cell regions. (3-cell regions can't fill the grid on their own, and despite much experimentation, I've been unable to make a puzzle I liked with mostly 6-cell regions.) This puzzle is made up of exclusively 4-cell regions.
This puzzle is a bit of an etude, based on the following fact: this layout of Capsules cages is extremely restricted.
There are actually lots of ways to make this unique by adding eight numbers. The original way, that I made in the first version of this puzzle back before Puzzles for Progress was even a thing, looked like this:
Nothing wrong with it. It solves perfectly nicely. But I thought I could make it a little more symmetrical and interesting, so for Issue #33, I published this:
It's the same concept, but now there's no obvious way to break in. The key is writing down a lot of instances where a 1 or 4 only has two places in a cage, and getting all that allows the rest of the numbers to be placed.
But for the book, I decided that I wanted the logic to flow immediately. So I altered the positions of the 2 and 3 to get the final puzzle, which I think has a smoother solve.
Teaser for Tomorrow
Is the tomato a fruit? Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is cereal soup? That's the topic for tomorrow, in "Beyond Definitions: Prototype Theory?"
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