themeless 12: copycat

I love to peruse themeless grids from my favorite constructors and then try to fill them myself. Usually I have to update a few blocks to make it work– that’s what I did here. This is a copy of this incredible ea+pp themeless grid, but I cut into that central stack, making it three nine-letter words rather than five. That means this puzzle ends up with nine nines, which is the kind of thing that I really like, but solvers will likely not even notice unless I explicitly call it out. So here I am, calling it out.

Many thanks to sin, I mean Sinclair and Alex for their test solves!