Some general rules....

You'll want to post to the Events Calendar at least several days in advance if you can. Generally speaking the Approval will happen within a business day or two (meaning NOT counting weekends or holidays) so that's not bad. However when you go to send out your invitations it could take awhile, depending upon how many people are on your friends list.

The Maximum invitations you can send out is 300 over a 3 day period. Mean if you happen to have 1000 friends that you're trying to invite to something, just sending out the invitations is going to take 10 days at a minimum. (eg Send 300, wait three days, send another 300, wait another 3 days, send 300 more, wait 3 days, send the last 100.)

Now, as to why your events don't show up in the Events Calendar.

When you start your event I would suggest that you don't use the little short form thing that appears on our profiles. That seems to screw up more people than it helps, because of some of the defaults set in the system.

Instead click on the little box to put in your Event Title, then look just below the Create Event button for a link that says "Advanced". Click on that.

On the very first page up the one that opens, at the very top, you'll see Create what type of event? and below that in the dropdown box you'll see that it defaults to "Personal Event".

The trick is that Personal Events do not get placed into the Events Calendar. So change that so that it says Regular Event.

That's the main thing. After that just fill in the rest of the forms to create your event, and you're off and running.