Meanjin Muse
You have three weeks and counting if you want to crack the Meanjin puzzle(s) I crafted for Meanjin last month. A cryptic and a quick, both sets of clues embedded in dashes of flippant literature.
This second heads-up is due to the good souls of Grattan Street posting the puzzles, and entry details, on the Meanjin blogsite. In other words, if Meanjin is off your distribution radar, or you’d rather spend the money on buying goats for Uganda, then here’s your golden ticket to glory – gratis.
Though be warned. The solving is only half the puzzle. The rest is down to your Muse, arranging the 22 answers into a piece of writing, with the winning executions running in a future edition.
Which great author will you channel – the e-free genius of Georges Perec or a brisk ditty in honour of Edward Lear? Perhaps a florid shot of Winterson? A dour dose of Carveresque grunge? (I’m halfway though a Filipino novel at the moment – Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco – and he’s opted to combine noir with memoir/chatroom/dirty jokes/Pacific history/Trainspotting: any genre is your oyster.) So sharpen the quill and get solving.
March 10th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Except for one clue, I’ve just gone and done the Meanjin cryptic as it appears on the blog and was pretty impressed with it.
Nevertheless, mag network’s sound courage (5) I can’t solve, yet it doesn’t look like I’ve made a mistake.
Given the cross clues, the answer doesn’t seem like it could possibly exist!
I’ve looked over the crossword a few times to make sure there’s not another arrangement of answers, but there doesn’t seem to be another possible arrangement and the answer to the unsolvable clue seems like a non-existent word.
Have I just made a mistake and made myself look foolish here by scratching my head in public? Or has there been some kind of publishing error?
March 10th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
AS, you may need to delve the Meanjin blog a little deeper, as odds are your near-solution is letter perfect….
March 10th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Thank the lord for Google!