Read more in this series here.

2023 had come to a close and we were all working on our tasks for the first meeting of 2024, which would occur on January 7. I was still being dilatory about calling liability insurance companies, but it was definitely on my list. I’d set a meeting with the five folks on our Spanking 101 panel so we could discuss the syllabus, and that would be on the 14th. I also spoke to Strict Dave, who said he unfortunately wouldn’t be able to do a Corporal Punishment Court event (seriously, if you ever have the chance to see him do one, you should go; it’s great). Instead, since people were asking some of us about doing a Judicial Punishment event, we decided to go down that route. And we heard from someone who wanted to do a spanking magic show, which I’ve never seen but which has gotten good reviews in the past.

Meanwhile, other folks were planning the littles events — we were going to have an extra room open all weekend for littles, plus a specific littles event (a tea party with arts and crafts). We were looking for someone to run our Spankos of Color social. We were talking to potential vendors (I attended a vendor event in December where I gave our card and spiel to every vendor there). Speaking of our vendor fair, we also needed someone to run a spanking booth — unfortunately our first choice wasn’t going to work out, so we started looking for a second. We’d also decided that Trans Lifeline would be our charity of choice — the two Texas parties tend to donate to the American Cancer Society, but I wanted to do a charity that touched my life more than ACS has done, and since my best friend is a trans person, it made sense to me.

One of our biggest points of discussion through most of the first two months of 2024 centered around telling people who we wanted to play with — that is, we already had our lanyard colors set for top/bottom/switch/observer, but we didn’t have any way for people to easily tell what sex they were interested in playing with. Roleplay Roulette at Oasis uses wristbands to indicate that information, which we were planning to do for our version of Spanky Hawkins (which we eventually called the Spanking Carousel), but I wanted us to do something like that for the rest of the party. Part of the discussion was about how to make trans people more comfortable, since we were focusing on inclusivity, but just how complex did we want to make our system? We talked about it for a while on the 7th, and eventually decided to think about it before we made any decisions.

We’d also revealed our Saturday night theme — Atlantis — by doing an exclusive with the Spanko Podcast, and while I wasn’t 100 percent sure what I would be wearing to this event, I knew plenty of people would dress up, as they always do.

Hmm… what else did we work on in December and early January…? We set up our principal’s office and approached two folks we knew to be the male and female principals, both of whom were more than happy to take on the roles. We figured out a couple of locations for where to do the scenes, and eventually settled on our 7th floor suite. For Cheeky, we provided a list of people who we thought would be good deans and teachers. We hired a local kink photographer for a very reasonable rate to take photos at the vendor fair and at our photo booth. And, finally, we determined where we would put our volunteer list (SignUpGenius) and agreed to review the list of what volunteers we needed by the next meeting.

Things were going really well. By January 7, despite the fact that prices had gone up, we had 173 tickets sold, representing 30 US states and 5 total countries. To my surprise, the numbers of men and women (cis or trans, it didn’t matter) and tops and bottoms were relatively equal. I worried that we’d have too many male tops and not enough bottoms (of any sex) to satisfy them, but thankfully it didn’t look like that was happening.

Our final note for the 7th was that we would start having meetings every other week until March, so our next meeting would be January 21. At that meeting we mostly did follow-ups:

• When would we be closing ticket pre-sales, given that the room block would be closing on March 4 (per the hotel)?
• Create a tab on the master spreadsheet for what signs we would need.
• Draw up a contract with our photographer and plan a meeting with him to review exactly what we wanted.
• Amend our hotel contract to include the space for the littles tea party.
• Update the team on the tea party in general, as well as the SoC social.
• Discuss Sunday morning event options — author readings, magic show, judicial punishment. We got one of our supporters to run judicial for us, so that was definitely going on the list, and we discussed what we’d need for that particular event.
• If you’ve ever been to a kink convention, you know that there’s something called “pipe and drape”, which prevents outsiders from seeing what’s going on. The hotel was going to charge us thousands of dollars, so we decided to buy our own for only a few hundred and set them up ourselves.
• For the vendor fair, we discussed the spanking booth and spanking games.
• We again spent a bunch of time talking about the colored dots, and agreed we should talk to one of our trans friends about how people (not us, but attendees) might define men and women, and what to do about nonbinary individuals. I could tell at this point that this was going to be a major bone of contention until a consensus was reached.
• We wanted to provide sheets and towels for our public spaces, but the hotel was going to charge us a ton of money for them, so we bought our own. It would cost us way less in the long run, and we could reuse them year after year.
• The schedule for Sunday was getting a little out of hand, because we had so much going on. We moved the gender-specific events to Sunday afternoon to try and make room, but we had to shorten them a bit, unfortunately.

We only sold seven more tickets between the 7th and the 21st, which was a little disheartening, but we had still reached my threshold number of 160 for our first break-even point — the point where we would (supposedly) break even as long as I provided a bunch of seed money. My next break-even point would be where I provided somewhat less seed money, and the ultimate one would be if I could pay myself back for all the seed money. I’ll talk more about that in a future post. For now, January was done, and we were well and truly committed to making this happen. In the next post, I’ll talk about how February went.