Day 14 - METAPUZZLE: "Irrational"

The Solution

The phobias listed map to the prompts for the day 8-13 puzzles, and so provide an ordering for their answers:

Reading down the diagonal without being given any clue to do so is only an intuitive move for enfranchised puzzleheads, but maybe "put first things first" counts as a clue. Anyway, the answer is COOPER.

HOW DID I DESIGN THIS METAPUZZLE: Well, after I made puzzles with the answers SKEWER and CAMERA I decided to limit myself to six-letter words. I added CENSOR, NOBODY, and FLOWER with no idea of where I was going with this. But I did know I wanted to do a metapuzzle for Day 14, so whatever I did for Day 13 needed to make something possible.

I wrote a script to see what sorts of words I could get by diagonalizing random orderings of my five existing answers and one "blank" answer. The only wordlike thing this turned up was "COO_ER," so I decided my metapuzzle answer would be COOPER, meaning my Day 13 puzzle would have to be of the form _ _ _ P _ _. No problem.

With all that in place, I went to bed last night hoping that the prompt for Day 14 would lend itself to a Twin Peaks puzzle. I could do something with Major Briggs, Project Blue Book, "THE OWLS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM," et cetera! Well, it didn't work out that way!!!

Thank you for checking out my puzzles!!!

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