I changed the name of my newspaper on Friday.
Not permanently.
But for one day, The Daily Cryptic became The Dolly Cryptic.
And I loved it.
I've been doing these little special editions and themed clues because one of the things I never wanted The Daily Cryptic to become was just a machine that spits out a puzzle every morning.
I want to have fun with it.
I want the people who solve it to have fun with it.
And sometimes I want to look at the front page and think, I can't believe we actually did that.
Dolly Day was one of those days.
It started with 925
The clue was ridiculously small:
Sterling work from Dolly. (3)
And the answer was 925.
That alone made me happy because it's not what you're expecting from a cryptic clue.
"Sterling" gives us 925, the mark used for sterling silver.
"Work from Dolly" gives us 9 to 5, one of Dolly Parton's most famous songs.
Take away the spaces and the word "to" and visually you have:
9 to 5 → 925
It's a double definition cryptic clue, except instead of arriving at a nice respectable word like cryptics normally do, we arrived at three digits.
You can see the original Dolly Day edition, including the video, here:
https://thedailycryptic.com/blog/dolly-day-the-daily-cryptic-25/
I could have decided that using digits was against the rules.
Instead I thought it was perfect.
Because it's Dolly.
I think that's what I liked most about it
There is something funny about celebrating Dolly Parton by worrying too much about whether you're being conventional enough.
This is a woman who figured out exactly who she wanted to be and then turned the volume all the way up.
The hair.
The clothes.
The voice.
The songwriting.
The humor.
The business sense.
The whole thing.
She didn't spend her career slowly sanding away the unusual parts until everybody approved.
Which brings me to one of my favorite Dolly quotes:
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.
I keep thinking about that one.
Not only personally, but while I'm building The Daily Cryptic.
What exactly am I building here?
That's something I've been figuring out in public.
Technically, I publish one cryptic clue every day.
But I don't really want to build a website that simply publishes one cryptic clue every day.
There are already places to find puzzles.
I want to build this weird little newspaper where the puzzle opens a door.
You solve the clue, but then we keep going.
Sometimes there's a joke behind the door. Sometimes there's history. Sometimes there's a story. Sometimes we end up talking about something I didn't expect when I started writing the clue.
That's become the whole idea behind The Daily Cryptic:
The clue → the solve → the story → the lesson.
The answer isn't necessarily where the edition ends.
Sometimes it's where the interesting part begins.
On Dolly Day, we ended up talking about life.
Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.
Of all the Dolly quotes I could have put into an edition built around 9 to 5, that one had to be there.
I've spent plenty of my life being busy.
I think most of us have.
There's always another thing that needs to be finished. Another project. Another email. Another thing that feels terribly important at 2:17 on a Tuesday afternoon and that we'll probably never remember five years later.
Meanwhile, the actual day is happening.
That's the part of Dolly's quote that gets me.
You can get very good at making a living and accidentally forget that the living was supposed to be the point.
Then came the rainbow
I ended the edition with another Dolly quote I've always loved:
If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
It's such a Dolly way of saying something difficult.
She doesn't pretend there isn't rain.
She doesn't tell you the rain is secretly wonderful.
It's rain.
You put up with it because you know the weather changes.
I like that.
There have been enough times in my own life when I couldn't see very far beyond whatever was happening at that moment. Most of us probably have chapters like that.
And then somehow there are new chapters.
New people.
New ideas.
Sometimes, apparently, you wake up one morning and decide you're going to start the world's smallest newspaper.
Life is strange.
This is why I'm having so much fun with The Daily Cryptic
I think Dolly Day helped me understand something about this project.
I don't want every edition to look the same.
I don't want every clue to behave itself.
And I definitely don't want to build something and then become so protective of the format that I'm afraid to play with it.
October is Movie Month.
We're spending the month playing with movies, actors, famous lines, titles and whatever else we can squeeze into a cryptic clue.
Then November gets even stranger.
I'm turning an entire month into a Sherlock Holmes cryptic murder mystery, where the daily clues become part of a larger case.
And somewhere along the way, readers have started submitting their own clues that are becoming official editions of the newspaper.
That's the part I never could have planned.
This little newspaper is starting to develop a personality of its own.
Friday, it wore a blonde wig.
One last thing from Dolly
If I had to keep only one of the three quotes from Dolly Day, I think it would still be this one:
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.
I'm 50 years old.
I'm still figuring out parts of the first half of that sentence.
But I'm getting much better at the second.
The Daily Cryptic is part of that.
Make the weird little newspaper.
Change the masthead when you feel like it.
Put 925 in a place where everybody expects a word.
Make something you actually want to exist.
And do it on purpose.
You can read the original Dolly Day edition and watch the video here:
https://thedailycryptic.com/blog/dolly-day-the-daily-cryptic-25/
Or go solve today's clue:
GGs.
Kit Elliott