Hi Carol, I am so sorry to read about your disappointing experience with Illumination. You joined it at the wrong time because during that period, we accumulated a massive backlog that was impossible for 30 volunteer editors to process. Unfortunately, Medium does not allow the addition of more editors for unknown reasons. It is humanly impossible to to manage the load of 30K writers with 30 volunteer editors. I put several measures. Some volunteers worked extra hours. We finally took it under control, but it is still very painful to manage this colossal pub with limited editors. I wrote about it lately. https://medium.com/illumination/patience-illumination-backlog-reached-2000-submissions-and-the-future-of-i-c-uncertain-2d1d68d9f469

But this story is about my curated pub, which only served accomplished writers. We only published around 10 exceptional stories meeting boost guidelines. But it did not work for the reasons I tried to articulate. If you are still interested, I’d be happy to get your stories published on Illumination or any other pubs. You can log delayed story issues on our pub's virtual helpdesk in the Slack workspace. You may send me an email through this link when you need help. https://digitalmehmet.com/news-break-inquiries/