This puzzle has an involved history, much of which I’ve forgotten. I vaguely recall spotting DEAD-AND-ALIVE, and noting it had 12 letters, and could describe Schrodinger’s Cat, and, oh, look, SCHRODINGER’S has 12 letters as well, and finally the concept of having the solvers decide how the two states resolved. Somewhere along the line came the thought that solvers needed to corroborate their choice in some way, which led to looking for words where D could be replaced by A to form another word.
But where did the mirror symmetry come from? I can’t remember that ever being an issue, or testing out alternatives. This is quite an old puzzle in terms of the initial grid fill, and it has spent some time in the file waiting for something to happen to it.
To be frank, it started life as a puzzle with ‘Enigmatic Variations’ stamped all over it. It’s generally true that objects with things stamped all over them need a clean before you can see them clearly. Once I’d done that, it was obvious that the multiple solutions with corroborative separate elements made it unsuitable for a newspaper competition - well, possibly The Listener, but it didn’t “feel” like a Listener puzzle. So Magpie it was.
But not before I’d clued it for EV, with a simple gimmick that ignored As and Ds in wordplay. And that, as it happened, didn’t seem right either. So back on the shelf it went for several months.
One thing I happened to know was that STREAM-ANCHOR is an anagram of MARCH-TREASON. Not exactly earth-shattering, and of little use when the zombie apocalypse strikes, but it sent me back to DEAD-AND-ALIVE, with the contrast of activity and inactivity, and hence the idea of anagramming some clue answers to make the entries. So a period of checking how many answers could be anagrammed to other words – yep, certainly enough to give me 20 of each type, so I then weeded out the ones where I felt it might be a little unfair to jump from a ‘dictionary word’ to a proper noun, or vice versa. And so off on another round of clueing.
I do wonder how many solution cats were alive and how many dead. [Answer: 17 dead; 63 alive]