205: 10 Years of Rejections, Then The New York Times Crossword
What does it take to turn a hobby into a side hustle that lands in The New York Times? For Mark MacLachlan, it took ten years of rejections.
By day, Mark is a chemist and the Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia. On evenings and weekends, he creates crossword puzzles.
After nearly a decade of submissions, his first puzzle was accepted by the LA Times in 2016, and his second ran in The New York Times, where more than 200 puzzles compete each week for just seven spots. He kept his side hustle a secret from most of his colleagues for almost 20 years, and when word…
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