margo always said to never apologize for how long it’s been since you updated something, so i’m not sorry.

I always knew that, unlike (at least some of) my parents, I would likely spend the bulk of my life living in years that began with 20 instead of 19. Even so, 2025 feels like a completely made-up year.

As anyone who follows Foul Puck has noticed, we’ve been on a bit of a hiatus. Rebecca’s job ate her entire life, Rachel’s beloved A’s got royally fucked by their absolute shitstain of an owner, and the Warriors traded Klay Thompson away, and are thus now dead to me. That said, Rachel and Kyle and I did have a chance to see the Bay Area’s brand new women’s soccer team play a game last fall (yay!!) and I’m very excited for the inaugural year of the Valkyries, the new Bay Area WNBA team! I’ve never seen a WNBA game, and I’ve been wanting the Bay Area to get more professional women’s sports for years and years, so getting those two teams back-to-back has been beyond exciting.

My main complaint about BayFC — well, ok, two main complaints — are that they’re playing down in San Jose, which is at the other end of the bay from me, and the appearance of the logo/merch vibe. I understand the choice of San Jose (it’s so they can share a venue with the Earthquakes while they decide what they want to do about a stadium long term), but it’s inconvenient for me, personally, so yanno. And much ink has been spilled over the underwhelming nature of the logo/merch (it’s just… boring? It’s got a very clean industrial/east coast kinda vibe, which like… you’re in the bay. Your merch should be funky, unique, and at least half rainbows.) But I will give them absolute props for putting their funding where their mouth is and also for hosting a good event! Rachel and I went to their launch party at the Presidio, which was a great time, and the game we went to was also very well run and a lot of fun, so I’m optimistic about their future.

One of the things I’m really looking forward to in the next couple of weeks is getting to see ZAYN in concert. I have a lifelong tendency to be either an early adopter or very late to the game, and in this case I was about a decade behind the hype, but I really loved his most recent album Room Under The Stairs. I didn’t figure he’d be likely to do a tour (he’s never toured a solo album, and has talked about how he struggles with anxiety and the pressure of touring and stage performance Does Not Help, which, fair), but then he did decide to do a little limited tour, and since San Francisco was on the list, I snapped up some tickets!

For some reason, people are always surprised that I like pop music? I’ve never been sure why. But I do! I was too old to be the target audience for One Direction (the band that made Zayn famous) when they were active — I remember being vaguely aware of them on the radio, but that was it — but I fell into them in the last few years and have been slowly listening my way through their discography and their solo works. It’s been great fun.

One of the goals I made in 2024 was to memorize a poem a month. I succeeded for exactly two months, so we’re bringing it back for 2025. The poem for January is Question, by the inestimable May Swenson. Join me!

I’m happy to report that our little press keeps trucking right along! We improved in 2024 on 2023, and we’ve got two new titles slated to come out in Q1 2025, so mark your calendars for those. We’re also working on a new anthology that we hope to release sometime around early summer, as well as a few other projects. We’re still looking for some more newsletter sign-ups and social media follows, so please come check us out!

In 2024 we released five titles: one anthology and four stand-alone stories. You can find them all on our website, of course, but I’ll call out two in particular — for fans of sweet romances, check out You Be The Flower, a period story about a mail order “bride”, and for those who like their romances raunchy, explicit, and hilarious, I can’t recommend Hardball Productions Presents enough.

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In other reading news, I read 53 books last year, which was up from 37 in 2023. It feels amazing. I think I’ve talked before about how many years I spent basically unable to read anything that wasn’t a news article or a blog post or a short story after grad school — I’d started to make some progress with that beginning around 2018, but to my eternal horror and amusement the book that really cracked me wide open and got me back into regular reading was War and Peace. You can see my thoughts on it here.

Highlights of 2024’s reading include Baltasar and Blimunda (so, so, just unspeakably weird in the prose and the magic and the concept, but also just unutterably lovely); The Wood Wife (also very weird and very lovely); and The Dreamt Land. 10/10, do recommend them all.

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Continuing extremely slowly through our Journey through the Tarot images, the five of blades was an early favorite of mine. Stephanie and I drove over to Sacramento, the first time we went to a site a little further afield, and shot it at the veteran’s memorial in the public park. I really loved the lighting and the images. It was around the four and the five that I really started to feel like I might kind of have a grasp on this project, and how I wanted it to look.

You can read what she (here) and I (here) thought of it at the time, or see all of the photos we took for this card here.