What's an 8-letter word for 'reinstated'?

An old friend has come back to please your puzzling mind and intrigue your intellect.

Beginning this week, Wayne Robert Williams, highly regarded for constructing and editing shelves-ful of puzzle books and magazines, is again the man behind the crossword puzzles that appear Monday through Saturday in The Inquirer.

His name might be familiar to Inquirer puzzle pencil-pushers: The paper published his crosswords for years until 2009, when Tribune Media Services stopped distributing Williams' work. He began self-syndicating his puzzles, which include word searches and cryptograms, about six months later.

"Month after month I keep gaining newspapers. Philadelphia is number 32," said Williams, who started constructing crossword puzzles as a teenager. "I'm thrilled to be back."

Williams, 62, of Clearwater, Fla., is thrilled, too, to be reintroduced to the region's crossword puzzle solvers.

Question: What is your background and how did you start making puzzles professionally?

Answer: I grew up in Scranton. . . . went to Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y. I left without a degree after 31/2 years, majoring in psychology, but I wanted to be an artist. I went to New York City and worked as a paste-up artist for various catalogs and in-house publications until I got a job at Dell Publishing and got to know people in the crossword department. . . . I began to produce legitimate crossword puzzles [around 1968]. . . . I was able to get a lot of creative satisfaction from it.

Q: Do crossword puzzle creators have different styles? What is your style?

A: There are a lot of people who have no style at all . . . with computer programs these days, you could just select a diagram, tell the computer to fill it in with words, and then write clues for those words, and you would have a puzzle - but it would be run-of-the-mill. . . . I try to use ordinary and interesting words in the diagram while keeping obscure words to a minimum. I use clues to control the difficulty level of the puzzle and to add to the fun of solving the puzzle.

Q: How do you create your crossword puzzles?

A: I sit down with my laptop and start working. I have an idea for a good theme of a 15-by-15 crossword puzzle, hopefully an original theme or a new twist on a well-traveled theme. People with birds in their names would be a well-traveled theme - a twist on that theme would be people with a bird in their name who all fit into a category, like baseball players. . . .