So near, and yet so far? dhu? tour? fare? aaaargh!!!

This one looked pretty straightforward, words in clues had to be shifted to the right, then afterwards some moving of "words" (curious quotation marks - my first thought was that maybe these are computer words, so I'd be moving bytes around). The last few weeks have been pretty busy, and I haven't had long breaks where I could work on solving. OK, plan of attack...

14 clues are normal, 32 need words moved, so always be looking for words to move. And the initial grid is going to be all real words, so let's grab chambers word wizards and Bardford's and solve away...

I didn't make a great start on this, a few clusters of words, mostly in the bottom half of the grid. There were some clever clues, my first "set of 4" appeared with the last 4 across clues - BOATEL as TOWABLE damaged minus W, VEAL as five each pound, INLY as Milton's entirely, and trashy UNITED STATES, no TUNE (this was an awesome clue) giving DISTASTE.

The top right of the grid turned out to be a heavy slog, and there are a few guesses up above (MEER, ORDE, ARED) where I can't quite get the wordplay together. However I now have a completed (fingers crossed) grid, and sets of 4 where the coordinates have to be. I can't see the name of the creator of the theme, but there's a suspicious TOUR near the top right.

Here's where it gets thorny...

I can't tell in 1ac if the word to be moved is balls (making the definition "battered and deep fried balls") or essentially ("battered and fried balls, essentially). This means the first word to be moved is either at B,R (LA, LAR, LART?) or E,R (FAR, FARE). The latter looks more promising. The other two "words" to be moved start at C,Q (hey, there's my TOUR) and D,P (DHU - that's a type of pilgrimage, so looks probable).

Good news is that the moves do seem to correlate with the letters moved, so I have

BR -> MV, CQ -> HS, MV -> LT, DP -> MT, LT -> DR, HS -> CV and DR -> CV

Apparently HR,HW is useful, originally it reads EVADAS, when I move TOUR there it says ETOURS.

And this is where we come to a crashing halt... no combination of my moved words gives me either of the things I need, complete words in the grid and 18 blank squares. This is the most promising combination of moving around my "words", and it has 20 blank cells

A

f

a

l

a

f

e

l

s

i

m

a

m

B

o

r

a

l

a

r

t

a

m

a

l

e

C

r

e

p

f

a

r

e

e

D

s

s

o

m

e

r

E

w

a

y

e

q

s

o

r

t

F

e

t

b

r

s

u

c

c

u

s

f

h

G

a

r

i

e

l

k

e

a

b

e

l

e

H

r

u

n

e

s

t

y

c

J

s

n

a

t

h

s

o

b

e

r

e

r

K

t

n

u

c

l

e

a

r

t

o

g

a

L

a

i

r

y

i

t

o

u

r

e

d

M

b

o

a

t

e

d

h

u

a

l

N

i

n

l

y

d

i

s

t

a

s

t

e

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

It's possible that I don't have to move the whole of TOUR, but that just doesn't seem right. I thought I had it, but Mango, you have bested me. I can't think of a better word than ARED at 2D, but even so, changing the number of letters I move there from 2 up to 5 doesn't help with the number of empty cells. It was an interesting battle, but victory to the Listener crossword.

Current tally: Listener 6, George 9. Current streak, Listener 1.