Listener No 4633, Cool Places Only: A Setter‘s Blog by Ares
Posted by Listen With Others on 6 Dec 2020
The inspiration for this crossword came from two things that happened on the same day:
- mis-hitting the key board and my autocorrect producing a real word by omitting a ‘b’;
- reading an article on colony collapse disorder, realising that title was effectively an instruction to make an anagram from ‘colony collapse’.
I then set to work finding as many b-containing words that I could which became real words without the b. The list was longer that I’d expected but it was too constraining to have every answer coming from that list. So I decided to mix and match between clues and answers. However, I was unable to ensure every single clue/answer was affected but fortunately the editors were able to adapt the few that didn’t — my clue-writing is, I fear, still in its infancy.
The idea for producing APIS within the final grid was to make the point that, by making a change, we can still ensure there are bees about.
Listen With Others 
Resumen de crucigramas: ¿quién quiere que lo pateen arriba? - Noticias del Mundo said
[…] Para mí, esa plantilla en particular se terminó a fines del año pasado cuando me di cuenta de que un Oyente Puzzle tenía como tema el trastorno del colapso de colonias, definido por Chambers como “una enfermedad grave e inexplicable capaz de provocar la destrucción completa de las colonias de abejas”. Todas las letras «B» debían eliminarse de las pistas o respuestas. Un entrenamiento apasionante: no es el escape abstracto por el que había venido, pero como comenta el setter Ares en el blog de los solucionadores Listen With Others: […]
Crossword roundup: who needs to be kicked upstairs? | Crosswords | StarsPressNews.com said
[…] For me, that particular jig was up late last year when I realised that a Listener puzzle had as its theme colony collapse disorder, defined by Chambers as “a serious and unexplained disease capable of bringing about the complete destruction of bee colonies”. All the letter “B”s needed to be removed from clues or answers. An engrossing workout: not quite the abstract escape I’d come for, but as the setter Ares remarks at solvers’ blog Listen With Others: […]