Read more in this series here.

Outside of the whole “getting our money for people who bought tickets” thing, the party planning was going quite well. That was a pretty big thing, though. Originally we were going to use Paypal, but when we tried to sign up for a Paypal business account they decided they didn’t want a website called “spankinginatlanta.com” hosting their content. Okay, I get it. We tried a few adult payment processors, but either they were too expensive or we were too small. We decided to buy a new domain, name it after our corporate entity, keep it super-bland with no branding, and sell tickets that way, and Paypal didn’t complain. We worked with a web developer that we connected with via NotSoKnotty to get our storefront set up, and we tested it extensively. It worked great, and now not only could we get our money pretty much the next day but we could also allow people to take advantage of Paypal’s buy-now-pay-later feature. It was a very busy couple of weeks, during which time we kept on selling tickets through our original vendor, but we made it work.

Also on my list was to check with liability insurance companies, a task that I put off for several months. Oops.

By November 5, we had sold 85 passes. That’s quite a lot, considering that, as of April 19 of this year, the number of confirmed people going to the MWFE Spring Spanktacular in Chicago was under 100 (with under 200 total marked as “going” or “interested”), and the party occurred on April 20. (Nothing against MWFE; I’m sure it’s a great party, but I haven’t had the opportunity to attend it yet.) Also, our numbers of “interested” or “going” had exceeded 200 by that point, and by the day of the actual start of GASP we had about 700, with 300 marked as “going”. More on that as we start talking about the actual party execution in a few weeks.

In the meantime, we put together our somewhat-concrete schedule and posted it on our site and on Fetlife, to drum up interest. We continued our media blitz, such as it was, and we did a lot of marketing at November’s Lone Star Spanking Party — a lot of people seemed quite excited. Especially the folks from the Spanko Podcast, who did a whole episode just about us. Our final meeting of the year was December 3, and at that point we had 114 total passes sold.

Dang. This thing was becoming real, wasn’t it.

We took most of December off, working independently on our various tasks, knowing that starting in January we’d be meeting every other week. During that time we met with vendors and with people who might want to run specific events, such as a CP Court or a Judicial Punishment scene. We set up a bedtime spankings event for Thursday night and started planning for a littles-focused event. We also got buy-in from the DMs who run the dungeon at Lone Star — they would come to GASP and DM our dungeon for us. At this point we were working with a group that has since fallen out of favor, but that was an issue to deal with as the year turned.

In the meantime, we had holiday plans. Of course, all the people who were excited about GASP were like: