The art of crafting word puzzles

East Lyme - Longtime solver, first-time composer.

That was John Geida when he sat down with a blank piece of paper to try to compose his very first crossword puzzle. He'd solved them for years but never really considered coming up with his own until he moved to East Lyme in 2006.

"(I) started thinking, 'Now, how do you do this?'" Geida, a retired public school music teacher and principal in Levittown, N.Y., said.

Information he found online taught him the basics: that grids should be symmetrical and have an odd number of boxes, that clues with abbreviations should have an abbreviated answer.

Puzzle fans probably know all this, but solving puzzles and composing them are two very different things, Geida learned. Still, it wasn't long before he got the hang of things and learned that word play could be a very fulfilling hobby post-retirement. It's a side gig to his other side gig, as a musical and comic entertainer for senior centers, weddings and more.

With the help of dictionaries, atlases and "Crossword Compiler" - a program that helps him choose words to fill out the grid - Geida has been composing all sorts of puzzles. He prefers puzzles with themes and has composed Connecticut-central ones such as "It's In Connecticut" and "Casino Lingo."

For the casino puzzle, Geida, 67, had fun playing with card-game terms such as "double down" (clue: twice as sad) and "royal flush" (clue: majestic rosiness).

"I like to play with words," Geida said. "Playing with words is really fun."

Geida believes in making the clues challenging, but not hair-yankingly difficult. His philosophy is that "a crossword puzzle should be done relaxing, sitting down."

That doesn't mean composing puzzles is always relaxing. Geida works on them whenever the mood strikes him - "Sometimes at 3 in the morning, when I can't sleep," he said - and each takes about 12 to 14 hours to develop over a stretch of several days.

Geida has composed some 40 or 50 puzzles by now and distributes them to friends and family, including his 95-year-old mother. He enjoys the feedback he gets as well as the way he can occasionally stump them.

"They'll give me a call and say, 'John, that 36 across. I can't get that one,'" Geida said.

Geida likes to develop puzzles for elderly fans who may not understand all the clues in modern-day puzzles but will know right away who the actor Chuck Connors was and what Westerns he was in. He's cognizant of how puzzles can help keep aging minds active.

"When you do get to that age, a lot of things get fuzzy," Geida said of getting to your 90s, like his mother. "These things help her."

J.CHO@THEDAY.COM