Sid Sivakumar is a medical/graduate student and self-proclaimed word nerd based in St. Louis, MO. He also finds it weird to write about himself in the third person, so he will stop doing that now.
I somehow graduated from Scrabble in grade school to crossword and variety puzzles in college. I’m not sure what AP credits qualified me for the jump. (Yes, I'm also a fan of dad jokes.) Now, in med/grad school, I've taken my puzzle construction hobby a little more seriously, have submitted puzzles to various outlets, and have had a few accepted! The vast majority, however, have been rejected; those puzzles will be lovingly collected, dusted off, and reproduced here for you to solve.
I promise: the puzzles you’ll see here are actually pretty decent, even though most have been passed on by newspapers. I’ve learned that the mainstream puzzle industry operates under an enormous number of constraints, and unfortunately, good work often slips through the cracks. I make a sincere effort to keep junk out of my grids (you’ll never find OOX, EROO, or any number of barely justifiable entries), and I try to include interesting words you might not see in mainstream crosswords.
You might also see puzzles here that are unlikely to find a home elsewhere for other reasons: non-standard grid sizes, bizarre gimmicks, avant-garde and/or absurd themes, and inside baseball for crossword enthusiasts. I doubt many of the puzzles I post will fall into this category.
A short disclaimer: I construct in my limited free time, and I plan to make the puzzles on this website either free or close to it. As much as I’d like to establish a regular publishing schedule, at this point I’d be doing you a disservice by promising anything of the sort. I’ll post whenever I can, though!
If you like the puzzles, you can always drop me a line and let me know. I'd love to hear from you! Or, if you really like them for some reason, you could chip in with a small donation. (But you really don’t need to do that.)
Besides puzzles and biomedical research, I love writing and playing music, eating other people’s food, and spending quality time with family. Those last two are highly correlated.
I hope you enjoy!
- Sid
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