a useful construction trick

hello! it was recently brought to my attention that a couple years ago i said on Discord that i would explain a certain useful constructing trick i use and then forgot to follow up lol. well, today's the day i finally make things right :P whoops here's a basic example to start: let's say you're trying to fill a grid where 1-Across starts at the top left square and is 10 letters long, and you want 1-Across to be anything from your seed list (but you don't care what). then what you can do is: 1. create a custom dictionary which contains all your 10-letter seed entries, except with some arbitrary non-letter character like "1" prepended to each of the words. (i have a python script for this. side note: i don't have a "seed list" per se, i just pull out the highest-scoring entries in my personal wordlist/edits file.) it should look like this: 1BENDYSTRAW;59 1HEARTEMOJI;59 ... (side note #2: i always use odd scores for entries tha...