Do you have dreams about being the person who makes otherwise smart people sweat over the Sunday Times? if so, turn your passion into a published puzzle.

If you're a novice, here are some thoughts on how to solve and construct good puzzles, including relations between question and clue.

There are programs, like for anything else, for constructing crossword puzzles. Crossword Weaver is an example, or you could use good old Excel, too. (NB: I have not even tried to write a puzzle, so I cannot vouch for these programs.)

Here is an article on one of the youngest puzzle writers in the game, the Times' Brendan Emmett Quigley.

Where and how to submit crossword puzzles? Would-be writers are lucky in that there are entire publications dedicated to the form, so go to the newsstand and pick up a puzzle magazine and look for the submission guidelines. Or find on the masthead of a newspaper who edits the puzzles for that particular publication.

A warning though: you are not likely to get rich constructing crossword puzzles, so if you are going to spend a lot of time working on them, do it for the love of the game.