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Sorry sircrispin if I misspoke.

Good to know jono. Congratulations.

Many have claimed that they saw parts of the phrase even as they were filling the dials. I see the last word. A plausible penultimate word, I can make out only if I anagaramised the letters in clue order - which is not required.

So it's the letters, and the order. I think the order has been nailed by earlier posts.

I will get my coat.

Not at all Ilippu.

I had too many mis-assigned letters and went down the rabbit hole of trying to imagine four concentric circles... So I was indeed at a loss.

I've got the 23 at last. Just the Hilary Step now...

Thanks mattw.
I'm in the same place as puzzledpom.
I even tried downloading something indicated by the last two words (and completed it) hoping for inspiration, but no go. I also counted all the appearances of each letter in the grid, hoping to reverse engineer from `23 cells'.
Is another hint possible? I suppose it is still quite early in the month. But I've never not completed a Genius before, and am getting quite cross with myself!

Hi oldwolfie, If you completed what I'm hoping/guessing you did, you are on the right lines. Not sure I cam say much more without giving the game away....

Like Old Wolfie, this is the first Genius I've not been able to finish. I have the grid complete and I have a (sixth?) word which describes this type of crossword (politely!) and a second (?) word which describes what makes up a crossword ... but the letters around make no sense - NAIN and CASTODY etc ... and neither does applying each to a quarter of the clues.

oldwolfie
If you've done the 5th and 6th words of the message, it's not convoluted and much simpler than counting occurrences of each letter or some such other. Just compare the letters in the 5th/6th with the letters in your Genius solution.

hi Prosperos, the way I did it was working backwards from the word you have.

There was a rogue 'I' in my second last word which I still can't quite explain.

Anyway, I put that aside in the Too Difficult pile and I got the second last word of the special phrase.

Then it was just a question of muscling through to the start of the instructions. It was a slog, but when I found an unlikely 'C" sparking the whole thing off:. Eureka....

prospero

i am probably closer to where you are.

I have NTAINS and I have had the last word. The second last word's last 4 letters and previous hints made me look up Kite, Imogen, Paul etc with not much success.

I don't have the second word -

propspero, if I may offer some minor observations without being too spoileresque:-

- the word you think is second, I think is third

- NAIN needs a couple of letters before it and one inserted into it to make sense

- the CASTODY string you have found does not have a C in that position, and is missing a letter towards the end; and once resolved you'll see that this particular string of letters covers half of the words in the final phrase

Just finished - finally understood the Special Instructions! However, I can't parse 1d: "Stuck moving forward at first eventually was busily active (6)" I have the Dial letter and answer, but the heat has defeated me - what am I missing in the clue?