General advice sought

[bookishfellow]

I may soon find myself in the position of wanting to construct a medium-easy (as in, not harder than a NYT Weds) crossword in which some words need to have letters removed before being entered in the grid, the removed letters spelling out a secret message. Never having made a serious attempt to construct even a normal grid, I'm not sure how tough a

Comments

[qaqaq]

Will the entries become new words once the letters are removed, or will they just be letter strings? For example, to remove an A, would it have to be something like STARING (clued) and STRING (entered), or could it be QUASAR (clued) and QUSAR (entered)?

[bookishfellow]

Um, yeah. 'Cos see, I hadn't even thought ahead to that level of detail. Forming valid entry words would be nice, but if it adds enough more complexity to the composition process I'll gladly jettison it.

[cazique]

I'm not necessarily "in the know" but some ideas popped to mind to potentially make it easier: (Replying to Trip's message in case he has ideas on my ideas.)(1) if the message is short you may be able to do it in a smaller grid, like 9x or 11x. Shooting for 4 letter words clued with the extra letters in it (like Trip had below - or GEL clued as GRETEL, LENO clued as LENORE, etc - those might be do-able to put in as anchor entries in the corners and build the corners around them - with common letters and small-size corners that may not be too hard. Also a smaller grid might make it less crucial to have a theme in addition to what you're already doing

[bookishfellow]

Conversation with some other people involved in the project just made my job a whole lot easier. Instead of a grid, I'm tasked to come up with a bunch of disconnected clues that will lead to deletions which, taken in order, will spell the secret message.