Pending stories taking a long time to get published

[SkyBubble]

It seems that getting stories published has become really slow. What's up with that? For example, in "Interracial", it used to take two days--now I've got a story at eight days and counting. Or is something messed up just for me? Thanks!
I also have five stories in "Fetish" pending for twelve days--that seems really slow, too.
I'm an established author, and I'm not breaking any rules. Nothing inappropriate in terms of content.

It seems to be a combination of a number of things:

There has been an increasing number of submissions.

A number of those either are AI slop or appear to be, so Laurel has a lot more checking to do.

There's been a glitch for months where stories just get stuck in Pending. It's much better than it was a fe months ago, but it doesn't appear to have disappeared entirely.

All of those things contribute to a backlog, which slows down the process of approving stories.