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A couple weeks ago I was solving Matt Gaffney’s Week One puzzle for this month and I noticed that the clue/entry pair “Two tablets, maybe”/DOSE had a curious feature: the beginning of the clue (specifically, its first word) was a good clue for the beginning of the entry (all but its last letter). Probably I noticed this because dose and dos are homophones, but anyhow, it seemed like the basis for a reasonable metapuzzle.
The grid above has lots of entries that would be fine without their final letter, but only nine of them – pictured above – were clued such that the clue’s first word(s) clued the shortened version:
5a: Fair or circus, for example – EVENT
15a: Diet coke size – LITER (oops, I neglected to capitalize Coke …)
13d: “Hey ___!” – YOU
4d: Gravel sorting device – SCREEN
28d: Wise men don’t believe in it – MAGIC
48a: A little bit of interpersonal intrigue, in contemporary lingo – DRAMA
46d: Arrange in advance, as a participatory audience member – PLANT
68a: Two pills, often – DOSE (continuing in my tradition of ripping off Matt …)
69a: Expense item for a dairyman – FEED
In grid order, those ending letters we cut off appropriately spell out TRUNCATED, which was the meta answer.
A little over 30 people solved this one. Next up is a 19×19 called “Name Game.”
The answer to the metapuzzle is a five-letter word. Submit you answer using the contact form by Monday, August 26 at 11 p.m. Pacific Time. I’ll post the solution, and a new puzzle, next Tuesday.
Bonus mini non-meta puzzle! I don’t usually create puzzles that aren’t metas, but a while back I came up with two made-up words of a similar nature, both 14 letters long, and they weren’t really useful for a meta … so I did what a normal person would do and made a 14×7 crossword out of them. Solve it if you like:
To keep up with the puzzles: Twitter @pgwcc1; follow the blog for email reminders; rss feed if you’re set up for that.
PGWCC 
Didn’t get the last one, but boy that’s great.
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