How does the VIEW ALL DRAFTS blog page get the drafts (if there's no way to get drafts in the API)?

AndrewF SuzieH ClaudiusH VikasB Can you folks give any input on this? 

I'm trying to create *some* form of blog manager board for our blog manager, who is frustrated by the lack of one OOTB. I know SMM offers this, so I'm hoping there is some hook I can use to get the same info. We don't need SMM, since we already use other tools for Social Media. All we'd like is a blog dashboard for the editor. 

However, as far as I can tell there's no ability to use LiQL to get draft status articles, especially if they're not your own. For example,

is_draft

is only available for Create and Update, not a Query (Read). 

When a post is in draft, it doesn't seem to be able to be accessed by LiQL, either. It just doesn't show up. For example, this returns no rows even though I just saved a post to draft with that author id:

SELECT * FROM messages WHERE author.id = '30'

Returns:

{
  "status" : "success",
  "message" : "",
  "http_code" : 200,
  "data" : {
    "type" : "messages",
    "list_item_type" : "message",
    "size" : 0,
    "items" : [ ]
  },
  "metadata" : { }
}

However, if I switch to the user (id=30) and look for the post id in the Canonical Url field, I can get the post ID, and when I search for that with LiQL, it returns the record. 

SELECT * FROM messages WHERE id = '7833'

Returns 1 record (leaving out results for sake of space)

Maybe I can set up a subscription for whenever a post is created and get the message.id from that? However, those instructions are fairly confusing. And where would I store the list of new posts? Can I set up a server-side array? 

Whatever the method to get there:

How can I use LiQL to generate ANY approximation of a manager board for our blog manager where I can display other authors' draft articles so she can review them before publishing happens? 

I'm stuck and can't find anything to truly help solve this on the boards or documentation. 

Happy to use API v1 or v2, hacks, pretzel logic, sorcery, or anything else. I'm asking you guys to think out of the box, please.  

I know it likely "can't be done" using normal means. Please offer suggestions of how I might make it happen. For example, how does the VIEW ALL DRAFTS get the drafts? Thanks!