Title: “Things Are Looking Up”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a 10-letter word.
Answer: PERISCOPES
Correct entries: 185 overall, of which 100 were solo solves

A surprise, to both me and to solvers: our Week 3 of 5 turned out to really be our Week 5 of 5. Egad! This week and next will now be (I hope) our real Week 3 and 4.

An 11×11 grid, and what to do with it? Two hints came at the long downs:

4-D: [Game played on a 10×10 board] = BATTLESHIP
11-D: [What crossword constructors have before we put the black squares in; they come in many sizes] = BLANK GRIDS.

What to make of these? Well, we have an 11×11 grid, but “10×10” mentioned in the first theme clue, and “black squares” and blank grids that “come in many sizes” in the second.

So what I wanted solvers to notice was that the puzzle grid has exactly 100 white squares (121 minus 21 black squares), the exact same as a blank 10×10 grid.

And this was the idea: take the 100 letters from the puzzle, slot them into a blank 10×10 grid, and see what happens. Mostly gibberish, but using our title, look up: the first column spells contest answer PERISCOPES, as in those you might see on submarines (a Battleship tie-in, of course).
Sounds logical in retrospect but trickier to spot than I’d expected, so a Week 5 it was.

One of my favorite puzzles of the year; didn’t score that well at Fiend somehow, but got the most enthusiastic solver comments (sent with submissions) of any puzzle so far in 2021.

It even took JanglerNPL almost two hours, but he got there:

121-11=100! Yay!

Squonk writes:

Please talk about how you managed to construct this. While I was writing out the 10×10 grid, I was thinking there was no way this was going to work. And yet it did.

Small grid but it took a long time. There are more constraints than there appear to be at first glance; each of the 10 letters in PERISCOPES has to sidestep black squares and the two theme entries and then each other to leave a fillable grid. And I thought that PERISCOPES had to be in either the first or last column, not just some random one.

Meg writes:

Neat!! Good thing I had the graph paper I keep for diagramlesses!

Lirath quips:

As a librarian, I’m pretty used to looking things up

cyn says:

Really creative. I’m loving the themed month thing 🙂

Me too! I think it’s working out quite well and I owe Pete Muller a beer. The constraint is adding to the creativity, as he put it with regards to his own site.

Same for docison:

Very impressive one, Matt. Enjoying the theme month!

And finally, golod says:

Required — for me — lots of deductive thinking, with a huge reward at the end.

Aha, someone has crystallized into words what every tough meta should be! That’s perfect.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s six-letter contest answer describes what you must often do to solve a meta.

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.