Well, it's one day till Wedding, and everything is frazzled, as you might expect. I've fallen down on commitments I made weeks ago, I haven't had a chance to see (or even talk to) the many close friends who have been generous and involved in the preparations (and financing!) of our wedding and reception, and I feel I haven't given enough time to any of the people I have seen in the past week. Plus, it's hard to stop myself from taking responsibility for the sheer happiness and pleasure of every person who will be at the wedding...which makes it difficult when there are people who just won't be pleased by different parts of it, and I'll know all about it. Bleaggghh.

The good news is that it's been a beautiful week, it's been great to see my family and my best friend from back in Michigan, and everything's coming together for tomorrow in organizational terms. Patrick and I keep reminding each other that the whole point of tomorrow is each other--that it doesn't matter if other people aren't 100% pleased by every wedding choice we've made, as long as we are--and the best part of this week is that we've managed to find a little bit of time for each other every day, something I'd been nervous about, ahead of time.

No writing, as Patrick mentioned in his journal entry. This is not good for my mental health. Today we got a note that we'd passed the first round at a magazine with our jointly-written high fantasy story, "Fire Magic." I'm pleased but not taking it too seriously yet...after the second round, I'll start feeling nervous for it! I also got a rejection from Alchemy today, but since I'm not sure which story it was for (I need to look it up in my database--this is one I just don't remember off the top of my head) I'm not too terribly disappointed.

And of course I was very pleased to see the July issue of Locus finally appear in the Leeds Borders yesterday. Naturally, my story isn't mentioned in the review of Flytrap 2, but at least I got to point out the picture of the magazine to my parents, and we all nodded solemnly over the line that said all the short stories were "very well-written indeed". Ah, the consolations of obscurity....

My apologies to everybody whose crits or email replies are massively overdue. I really wanted to get them all done and stay caught-up with everybody, but...gaah. We'll be off email for at least one week and probably more like two after this weekend, but by the end of August, I will try to catch back up on everything and everybody.

Wish us luck tomorrow!