I don't usually come back to edit the author's notes, but: Now that a few more people have solved this, I think I should mention that this is absolutely our first cryptic, and it's definitely flawed. I made some easy changes where I could to fix some correctness issues, but not all of them are easily fixable. Little tense and verb plurality isuses that I don't know that I can fix without destroying the surface.
-It's also worth noting that I like to approach puzzle construction in a kind of fast-and-loose way; I want to write clues that make sense to me and I'm willing to bend and stretch rules for the sake of a clue I like more. My understanding is that this is roughly the distinction between US- and UK-style cryptics, with UK cryptics following more rigid rules and US ones going a little bit more by vibes. This is the first puzzle I had playtested before publishing it, but riotblob primarily solves UK-style cryptics so I did keep the fact that they're used to stricter cluing rules than I wanted to use in mind when I considered their feedback. I'll only know for sure if I went too far in that direction with experience.
+It's also worth noting that I like to approach puzzle construction in a kind of fast-and-loose way; I want to write clues that make sense to me and I'm willing to bend and stretch rules for the sake of a clue I like more. My understanding is that this is roughly the distinction between US- and UK-style cryptics, with UK cryptics following more rigid rules and US ones going a little bit more by vibes (Editing again to say that this is not as cut and dry as I thought it was at the time!). This is the first puzzle I had playtested before publishing it, but riotblob primarily solves UK-style cryptics so I did keep the fact that they're used to stricter cluing rules than I wanted to use in mind when I considered their feedback. I'll only know for sure if I went too far in that direction with experience.
I'm absolutely still proud of the puzzle, I just think you deserve this warning! :P