Read more in this series here.

At the same time I was working on getting the hotel squared away, I also started building a team of people, because I knew that I couldn’t do this by myself. TASSP has at least four people running it, and Lone Star has about the same. At the time Oasis had five, although two have since resigned their positions. I didn’t know exactly how many people I was going to need, so I made a list:

• Director — that’s me
• Second in command — someone to step in if I’m ever busy or unreachable
• Dungeon coordinator — someone to run the dungeon, from getting the equipment to getting it set up to training DMs and everything in between
• Events coordinator — I wanted two of these to put together parties, games, meetups, and so forth
• Hospitality coordinator — someone to run the hospitality suites
• Registration coordinator — someone to run the entire registration process, top to bottom
• Security coordinator — someone who can look intimidating when people break the rules
• Vendor coordinator — someone to wrangle the vendors for our vendor fair
• Volunteer coordinator — I also wanted two of these, because spanking parties cannot run without volunteers, especially to check badges

I put out a call on Fetlife for people who might be interested in these roles, so they could audition. (Well, not for second-in-command; that role was pretty much set already.) I got a few bites, and I also approached a few people. I knew that Greybeard would be interested in doing security, so I talked to him directly; he’d done security at Frolicon before. I also knew of a local individual who made dungeon equipment and DM’d various events who would be good for running the dungeon, and he said he’d join. One of my exes signed on to coordinate volunteers.

And then there were the people who actually auditioned. One of the, The-Great-Catsby, has experience in her real-life job handling large event registrations, so she was a natural choice for registration coordinator. Plus, I already knew her. I also knew Assaulted Peanut, who applied to be the hospitality coordinator in a long, detailed note that told me she would be great for the job. I got a couple of bites for event coordinator roles, one from Shannon (that’s her FL name), and one from a local person who eventually dropped out due to personal reasons.

The process of getting everyone together wasn’t easy. We had to find a time where everyone could get on a video call, which was difficult when we had people across three time zones. But we made it work, and we got to know each other a little bit, and then my ex had something personal come up and she had to bow out. Which is totally fine — if you don’t take care of yourself first, you can’t take care of other people. Fortunately, I was also friends with the dungeon coordinator’s then-girlfriend, StormyGin, and she stepped up to be our primary volunteer coordinator. I also approached Silverkettle, who I knew from previous spanking events and parties, to see if he wanted to help out with events and volunteers. He ended up focusing mostly on events, but that’s okay. After all, these folks were coordinators; they weren’t supposed to do it by themselves. We all worked together on everything.

At this point I’d set up a Google spreadsheet with several tabs, mostly to keep track of hotel correspondence, and I broke out the spreadsheet into tabs for each of the coordinators. We eventually lost the dungeon coordinator, and I was going to replace him with someone in the local community who’d volunteered to provide dungeon equipment, but late in 2023 it was revealed that he was not the kind of person we wanted to associate with. I’ll talk more about that later in the series.

Oh, and our second-in-command? NotSoKnotty, who just happens to be Partner 1. As someone who’s done a lot of vendor fairs, she was the natural choice to coordinate that, and as someone who I confided in, trusted, and spent a lot of time with, I knew she could keep me in check when it came to GASP stuff.

So there we had it: a team that was ready, willing, able, and excited to put on a spanking party in March of 2024. Now we just had to get the actual work done. More on that next week.