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We had our class ideas and our marching orders. We had things to do over the next few months. Did they get done, though? For the most part, yes.

Our next meeting was July 23, 2023. For that meeting, we had to talk to some presenters and a DJ, figure out hotel rooms for our coordinators, do some Discord work, and start a media blitz. Miss Chris graciously agreed to do a class and sit on our newbie panel. Strict Dave wasn’t sure if he’d be available. MzJewcy declined. We continued working on some other folks to see if they were interested in presenting. We also got confirmation from the DJ and found out what his cost would be (relatively inexpensive). Our media blitz was pretty simple — post a lot on Fetlife, including creating posts in various groups. I built out a couple of different posts so I could post four times a day (if you post the same thing more than twice you get dinged) and created a list of hundreds of groups that I thought would be interested in learning about our spanking party — geographic groups, spanking groups, general BDSM groups, event collection groups, you name it. We also contacted the folks at Oasis, to let them know that even though we were going to start advertising a party we didn’t want them to think we’d be taking attention away from them — just, y’know, being polite about the whole thing. We already had buy-in from the folks at TASSP, and had even given away a free ticket to GASP at their silent auction the previous month. Finally, we assigned a few things that needed to be done for the next meeting: some graphic design work, some additional costs for other events, and talking to Cheeky about them doing a school role-play for us.

As of July 23, we had sold 11 passes and signed up one vendor. Not bad for an event that was still more than half a year away.

On August 20, We had a relatively brief meeting where we discussed presenters, some additional rules (like “no blood play in the hospitality suites”), and realized that our July deposit hadn’t been collected. We contacted the hotel about that, and they took care of it — it was just an oversight. At that point we had sold 25 passes.

But here’s where things got dicey. See, we had enough money in sales by September 17 to cover our next deposit, but we learned that our ticket vendor holds onto all monies until after the event is over, and there was no way to get our hands on the cash. That was problematic, but fortunately we had an angel investor lend us money to cover the third deposit. We’d done a giveaway where if people bought tickets and booked a hotel room they would get a custom commemorative implement, and that got us up to 61 passes sold. However, we had to change our ticketing system fast — otherwise we wouldn’t have enough money to pay the hotel when the time came for our next deposit, and we also needed funds to pay for other things going on during the prep process. We’ll talk more about that next week. At this point, we also had figured out the final list of presenters, and we’d met with the Cheeky team and gotten their agreement to run our school event — they were going to send us a proposal that we would review.

Overall things were going pretty well, minus the whole registration/money debacle. Our next meeting, on November 5, would be when we finalized the schedule as much as possible so we could get our rooms booked at the hotel. But the big issue was our ticket vendor, and we had to fix that first.