Acrostics
An acrostic is the “big brother” to the crossword puzzle. Once you get the hang of them, crossword puzzles seem rather pointless. When you solve an acrostic, you have something.
The solution to an acrostic is a quote. All of the letters of that quote have been disassembled by the puzzle constructor, then rearranged into “words,” clues for which are provided. The salient feature of these puzzles is that the first letters of the clue words spell out the author and title of the work from which the quote was taken. This gives you a sort of “third dimension” to work with.
How does one actually construct an acrostic? Many years ago, I would pour out the tiles from several Scrabble ™ sets onto a door across two saw horses, and proceed to push them around (the tiles, not the saw horses). There was a lot of physical labor in that, and it occurred to me that if I had ever come across a process crying to be computerized, this was it. Besides, that “mechanical” process was quite error-prone, which greatly annoys the solver.
So I wrote a program. It was a command-line driven DOS program. It was clunky and awkward, but it worked. Over the years, this effort has evolved to the slick Windows-based application I have today. “Norma’s Acrostic Constructor” has a lot of nifty features, and has evolved (and is still evolving) following suggestions received from those who use it.
An image of the installation CD is available for download here. This is a labor of love, and is free to the public. If you like it, you may send me what you think it is worth.
Acrostics may be simple little things, or “professional grade”, containing upwards of 250 or 300 letters. To see good examples of “serious” acrostics, here are two sources:
- “Acrostic Network”; 6 Rafferty Road, Stoneham MA 02180; donlanv@thecia.net. $18 gets you 6 issues/year, each containing 18 or 20 acrostics, constructed by people like me. Tell Vin Donlan that Norma sent you.
- “Shrinking Varlet”; P.O. Box 68. Woodland CA 95776; xtkwiz@aol.com. This is a privately published collection of about 50 acrostics per issue, appearing bi-monthly. $57 = 6 issues; $28 = 3 issues; $10 = 1 issue. Again, tell Dave Childers that Norma sent you.
“Norma’s Acrostic Constructor” is a Microsoft Windows application, and should run on Windows versions from Win95 through WinXP. It hasn’t been tried yet on Vista, and I would be interested in hearing about such an attempt.
To install the program, download the CD image from here and unzip, then click Setup.exe. The program will install in your “Programs” group. In that folder you will find your OwnersManual.txt.
The installation will be version 8.2.2. Version 8.2.3 is available for the asking as a replacement for the executable.
