The May edition of Holiday Heat comes out on May 15, and is now available for pre-order. Trust me, you’ll want to read this one. Get it here!

Read more in this series here.

The team was built. The hotel was booked. The first deposits were in. Now it was time to get down to business. Now it was time to make registrations happen.

With leadership from The-Great-Catsby, and research from several of us, we eventually decided upon Showpass as our ticketing vendor. Catsby got it set up, I finessed it, and before long we had a page where people could buy tickets. We set the price at $180, which was quite literally the minimum we could do and still break even, as long as we had 150 attendees. (At least, I thought we could break even. More on that in a future post.)

Before we started promoting our ticketing site, though, we had to put up our GASP information on Fetlife, and on our actual website, spankinginatlanta.com. I knew we weren’t going to have everything ready, but I knew more or less what we wanted to do:

• Pizza party Thursday
• Meals Friday and Saturday
• Vendor Fair
• Dungeon
• F/F, F/M, and M/M Events
• Some sort of large role-play (to be determined later)
• Hospitality Suites
• Principal’s Office

That was just the start, but it was enough to get us underway. I created a registration form to gather people’s badge names, dietary restrictions, and so forth, linked it to the ticketing site receipts, and we finally set the site live.

Our first meeting as a team was on June 25, 2023. The plan was to have monthly meetings for a while, then bi-weekly, and finally weekly as we led up to the event. At that meeting, it was reported that we had 11 registrations — most of them being friends of mine from the spanking party community who were interested in supporting us (which was greatly appreciated). We’d taken in just under $2000 — or, more precisely, Showpass had taken in just under $2000 and was holding onto it for us. Or so we thought — more on that in a future post. (I know I say that a lot, but it is true; there will be many future posts.) We were promoting heavily amongst our friend groups, on Fetlife, on our Discord, and at as many local munches as we could attend.

We also started discussing what classes we wanted to do. I suggested Miss Chris, Strict Dave, MzJewcy, Miss Bernadette, and ScooterJPM. Others were suggested also. I’ve taken several classes over the years from Strict Dave, including a very interesting one on the physics of spanking that I would’ve loved for him to present to us. Miss Chris was a well-known presenter, and MzJewcy had just done a caning class I’d attended. We also talked to a spanking party regular who DJs a lot of parties and agreed that we would bring him on as our DJ. My plan was to have four or five classes on Friday morning, just like most of the other spanking parties do.

A brief word on why things are scheduled the way they are — as I mentioned in a previous post, our hotel was charging us not for the spaces we rented (usually) but for the setup and breakdown of those spaces. By creating a classroom space and leaving it as-is for the entire first part of the day, we were able to save money. Plus, since we were using the same space for the dungeon on Friday and Saturday nights, resetting it for classes on Saturday or Sunday wouldn’t have been ideal. So we pushed everything together to make things as economical for us as we could.

Anyway, we had our marching orders for the next month. Or, to be precise, I had them, because most of the action items on our register were for me. That said, other members of the team also started building out their tabs on the spreadsheet — security, volunteers, events, vendors, hospitality, etc. — and we were well on our way to the first steps of planning the actual party itself.

Next week, I’ll talk about the next couple of monthly meetings and what went on in Q3 of 2023 as we built up steam.