Nice puzzle! You shouldn't need a constructor's note to use spoiler text - not sure what might have gone on with your test. If you happen to still have the link to it or see it happen again please send it my way!

Thank you! I might've been being dumb, as when I linked the url of the puzzle via discord the preview that unfurled showed the words with ll lines around them akin to this ll

Nope you're totally right! Crosshare isn't handling spoiler text correctly in social previews right now - I opened [this issue](https://github.com/mdirolf/crosshare/issues/335) to track it

One day I'll get a cryptic, your puzzles and article definitely help.

This one was pretty tricky, so don't feel too bad if it was a bit hard!

An evil Mini #5

Themed Cryptic 1

Awesome! Thank you for the explanations - that helps a lot even for ones that I got! The only one I missed was TARTS - seems obvious in retrospect, though 😂. I think ANGER was my favorite

🙌 Glad you found them valuable :)

The 'fun' with solving cryptics is that the lexicon of possible wordplay is so dense that nearly every clue might seem impenetrable at first but obvious after you see the 'trick'.

Setting up the clues as spoilers is great for cryptic beginners like me, I hope you make more like this!

Definitely will! Any way I can help flatten the learning cliff means that more people can access this superb puzzle format.  At some point I'm planning to retrofit each published one with similar blogs. 

These can be slow because I have a hard time finding 5x5 grids I like

Mini cryptic #4

Couldn't quite crack it but I had a great time trying!

**Intended down**

1D Recaps reversed, sans r (right). Space is a key on a pc

2D Anagram of car meaning swerve.

3D Remove AZ from zealous and anagram (buffalo) it

4D Attempted 4x definition of sweet

7D Former lover->ex homophone->x->10, with whole clue acting as the def.

7D had to change, but I've managed to keep the jist of a homophone of 'ex' working as the fodder.

"Ten" is a valid abbreviation of tenuto, which is a musical instruction to hold a note for full length. It seems easy enough to pick up on the cross-checks that I'm ok with this.

**Intended across**

1A Substitute alcohol for ale, and put it inside (onboard) ss, from ship.

5A Double-definition.

6A Substitute current for AC and vehicle for UTE.

8A Remove D (Roman Numeral 500) from seed (starting point).

9A Event is a do, and hidden in the fodder.

I’m still struggling to get a handle on cryptic clue logic, so thank you for walking through the reasoning! Honestly, I’m rather pleased with myself I even got 3 of them without having to check!

This one was a step up from my other ones mini-cryptics, some clues like 1A (substitution containers) are getting quite into "cryptic-ese" and hard to parse without being comfortable with Cryptics. Nice effort!

Personal best! I got 5 answers :)
Thank you so much for the explanations. We'll get the hang of these eventually!

Closest I've come! Just missed 7D and 9A! Nice one.

Nice Joah! 7D is a bit of a weird clue, and 9A has a deceptive definition of 'do', which might help misdirect people away from what it's trying to do.

Glad that you enjoyed it :)

I am very new to cryptics and I **LOVE** having the explanations of clue -> answer laid out for me instead of trying to reverse engineer them from correct(/ed) fill. Thank you!!

I'm glad you're enjoying cryptics and enjoyed the deconstruction. It prompted me to try something else, would you be able to lend your opinion on the efficacy of the blog I wrote [here](https://crosshare.org/crosswords/n4uWJQrhA9MX3nqat5XD)? (open in incognito if necessary)

TIA!

A cute wee cryptic

Thanks for trying this one! I'd always to happy to hear about clues that you thought worked well/badly, as how else am I to do better in future?

Very nice! Only one I haven't figured out yet is PRIZE - can you explain how that works?

Also more of a question - is the `!` in LEO just ignored because it's not at the end? If it's in the middle it's not an &lit?

Prize:  beginnings pre + zi with mum (keeping quiet)

Mike, I believe the exclamation point is there to indicate a command.

1A was intended as removing a P (piano/quietly) from zipper & anagramming.

My friend asserted that you can "always" just have !/? for the surface reading, and I thought this worked better with one. I believe ending !/? may be either, but if it reads well without it's 'cryptic'

I'm starting to catch on to the conventions. But how does 4D work?

I wrote that one as a triple definition, to try and be funny. 

One of the 'standard' types of cryptic clues is a double-definition; triples are rather off-beat but 'acceptable' (to my understanding).

nitpick: afaik "dan" refers to the level, not the martial artist, and is always accompanied by a number (i.e. someone can be 9 dan, but not just dan). unless the judoka in question is named dan lol

I believe that you can use the word to refer to people with a dan# ranking such as "She is a dan". But that may be a sort of lazy phrasing that's common to Australasians and has grown into common vernacular. But thanks for the nitpick, as I'm certainly aware that I might be wrong

I like the formatting of this, nice to be able to get hints without solving or revealing the whole puzzle. Thanks!

A little less cryptic

Thanks for attempting this crossword, and I'm sorry if 8D threw you for a loop; with a very oblique definition.

A few of these clues were originally written with indirect anagrams (e.g. 1A was "Military missions twisted tales"), which I believe have all been removed now.

This cryptic is a work of fiction

I would like to thank my friend adny for tidying up up 1D, and providing the inspiration for 4D.

And I would like to thank you for taking the time to do my puzzle, I hope you enjoyed it :)

Woo, thanks for solve this. I hope you enjoyed it :)

Very nice! I like the 5x5 fully checked - makes it much easier to get as a new cryptic solver I think. Mind explaining NINJA, ATTIC, and KEENS? I think those ore the only ones I can't figure out

Woo!
Ninja is maybe a little rogue. It's a Spoonerism of "Gin? Nah!"- which fits the fodders story
Attic is a backwards hidden, clued by revolutionary (right-to-left) prisoners (hidden).
Keens is the last letter of each piece of fodder, clued by finishes

Thank you - that all makes sense now 😊

I'm new to cryptics also (but I caught the spoonerism reference!). I didn't undertand 4D, could you explain it?

I'll acknowledge my bias, but say that I like them more as (to me) they're more primarily wordplay puzzles than general knowledge checks. 

But I definitely seem outnumbered in terms of quantity. Glad to brighten your day with something a little more novel :)

Could I get an explanation of 2D? Cryptics are still… well, cryptic to me!

This is a type of clue where the wordplay indicates 'bits and pieces' of the answer that all just get added together. Here there's a bird (tit) that gets added to either le (the in French) to get a word meaning name. It could have been Bird=le/la+a 3 letter word for name too. :)

Just a little cryptic

Thanks for giving this a go!

If you have any feedback/criticism, feel free to write it below—it's the best way for me to learn how to make these better in future.

Awesome! Thanks for posting this easier one - I still just barely squeaked it out but it was very fun to work through

cluing is defs a bit rough around the edges, but the fill is fun and there are some nice ideas in there

Thanks! These clues all came from a 'primer' I tried writing, where each of the main types of clues was described & the clues were colour-coded to fodder/wordplay/definitions. It was also my (first and mostly unsuccessful according to stats) attempt at writing an easier grid.

I’m hoping to add an article like what you’re describing to the homepage. Kind of an “intro to cryptics”. If you’d have any interest in contributing to it that’d be awesome - shoot me a msg mike@crosshare.org 😊

I "checked" after every word, but I think this is the first cryptic I've made it through without "revealing," so definitely approachable!

Woop woop!

I hope it was also an enjoyable thing for you to do :)

A (hopefully) approachable Cryptic

😻Thanks for trying out my puzzle!  😻

🙌 If there were any clues you liked/hated, feel free to let me know—it's the best way I can improve in future 🙌

Thanks for sharing it BJ! I'm new at cryptics so I only managed to get a couple of these, but it's always fun to try!

Thanks for the kind words Mike! 
One thing I tried to do was have a few wordplay indicators 'hidden' in compound words, such as "upset [to get tes]" or "bless [to remove a b]"—which would be pretty cruel for a new solver.

Oh wow that is definitely beyond my abilities 😂

28A was quite nice. some of the clues seem to have part-of-speech mismatches? a good effort

I was quite pleased with 28A :)

In the spirit of improvement, could you give an example of something you thought didn't really work?

13A - seems like either the def doesn’t work, or “object” is doing double duty
23A - part of speech mismatch (though i suppose for an &lit we can be a little lenient)
9D, 16A, 18D - can’t sort out your intended parsing

18D = change 'B' (born) in cenobite to 'J' (to top Judge), and anagram it (suffered); meaning banishment.
16A is probably doing too much, but Not one French waiter -> water -> eau, anagrammed with SOL(sun)shine removing (absent) 'in', and meaning "drinking holes".

BJ

@BradJ