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What a pity, however, the EV series seems to spoiled by its very short time-frame for submissions. Published on a Sunday to be in by the Thursday. The Inquisitor and Listener series allow a full extra week!
I think EV's policy in this is counterproductive and it seems to have the effect of discouraging would-be solvers from having a proper go and therefore from becoming regular readers of their paper.
Shooting themselves in the foot, I'd say.
As I am no where near the standard of many of the fans of the EV, I find the new submission date far too early for my feeble attempts. When the closing date was the Monday following I could manage to submit about 60% of them, now unfortunately, it is about 'once a flood'!
Totally agree about the time frame and always felt that 8 days was just right.
Even when it was brought forward to Friday it wasn't too bad but Thursday can mean a bit of a struggle -- to say the least.
I live in Portugal, so sending them in is rarely practical. Today was an exception, but post services here are pretty unpredictable. Things can take two days or ten days. This makes the whole thing very dicey in terms of arrival. I chance it if I can get it in Monday's post, and have actually won EV once, so it must have arrived on time.
Now that the time- scale to send in completed EVs is shortened I don't send them in at all, the post has only got to be 1 day late and the crossword will arrive late.
If the info gathered from this exercise convinces the powers that be at the Telegraph that they'd get a better response if they gave us an extra week it would be wonderful.
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