Rough Drafts with Potential: A Writer’s Plight

by Andie Salm Carver

Welcome back to your monthly Rough Drafts with Potential!

PSYCH! 

Rough Drafts with Potential will now be three to four separate pieces, so you can jump straight to the blogs that connect with you the most. 

I attended a UX Design Bootcamp (more on that below), and did you know that the average person will only scroll twice on a webpage before getting fatigued? I thought, Surely, that doesn’t apply to people who love to read and write, but the views for my website have absolutely plummeted recently. Devastating.

So, we pivot. I’m posting blogs under categories that align with the sections of the OG Rough Drafts with Potential mega blogs:

1. What to Watch = What I Watched
2. What to Read = What I Read
3. A Writer’s Plight = What I Worked On (This kind of blog!)
4. Tea with Andie = Life updates as they make sense, maybe with an actual story, combined with Big Thoughts I Thought

Besides this blog redesign, here’s what I have been working on since you’ve last heard from me:

Publish Your Novel: Self-Publishing & Marketing Masterclass

I have slowly been taking an online Udemy course called “Publish Your Novel: Self-Publishing & Marketing Masterclass.”

I have experience in freelance editing and independent traditional publishing but not really in self-publishing, and I wanted to be more helpful to my clients, who often approach me with questions about the process. 

Likewise, I wanted to understand the difference between service-based marketing, which I have done for fifteen years, and book marketing, so I could officially (and confidently) launch a new service offering. This course revitalized my confidence in my own digital marketing skills. I’m a wizard in WordPress, and I have nearly ten years of experience in email marketing in MailChimp. I have also done social media marketing since 2010.

So far, this course has taught me how to set up author pages in Goodreads, how to do keyword and category research for books, and how to get ebooks on Kindle Unlimited.

I would love to primarily offer book marketing services to my book editing clients, so I can help them shape aspects of their book that will determine marketing results, like the title, subtitle, and book blurb. However, for established authors, I can definitely help with website search engine optimization (SEO) and email newsletter distribution. Marketing copywriting is another area I can flex in.

UX Design Bootcamp by AGI

My full-time job at Prism Health North Texas sponsored some UX design training for me, which is a major perk. I love to learn, and UX is a skill you can take with you wherever you go.

Here’s the recap/thank-you email I sent my bosses after attending the two-day virtual bootcamp:

Good morning!

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to attend the AGI UX Design Bootcamp over the past two days.

I learned some key design principles that I think will help me in my day-to-day work.

The biggest benefit of the training was that it gave me the room to get creative and brainstorm. I was able to talk to the instructor about our website, and I got some good feedback that I’m excited to try out.

Expect elevated drafts from me soon for the pages we’ve been discussing:

• Homepage
• Understanding Your Cost and Insurance
• New from Marketing Request: “Philanthropy Page”

I also have plans to tweak these pages:

• Service pages
• Location pages
• Our Providers page

My plan is to ensure that each page has three ways to schedule an appointment with us, as well as some (light) new content to help build trust with our target audience.

I will, of course, discuss my ideas with you before implementing.

Thank you again,

***

And, as I said, that bootcamp also gave me some ideas on how to reformat my own website too! Perks on perks.

Writing Workshop: Proposal Accepted, Grant Pending

I submitted a proposal to Dallas Social Queer Organization (DSQO) to present a writing workshop on erasure poetry, partly as catharsis for queer folks in the face of anti-queer media and rhetoric, partly as a fundraising opportunity for their 501(c)(3) organization.

Here’s an edited draft of the proposal:

Erasure Poetry of Anti-LGBTQIA+ Media: Workshop and Anthology

I’m turning in my proposal for a workshop that I hope will become a poetry anthology collection we can print.

As you said, so much of the LGBTQIA+ community is being erased—our crosswalks, our libraries, our rights.

I would love to host a workshop on erasure poetry, printing anti-LGBTQIA+ passages for workshop attendees to blackout at the event, so they can reveal new combinations of letters, creating new words and, therefore, new meanings from a source material that means to eradicate us. This is how we take back our power, by insisting on our own existence even when others refuse to recognize it.

After the workshop, I’d like to open a two- to four-week submission period, during which time people can take their pieces home and tweak them before turning them in to us. Submissions would also be open to anyone interested in writing erasure poetry using anti-LGBTQIA+ media as a source material, not only those who attended the workshop. (Though I hope that workshop attendees will serve as ambassadors for the cause and help us promote it!)

Once we have all the submitted poems, we would hold an in-house review process and curate the best of the best. From those works, we would layout and then print the anthology collection.

Grant funds would be used to:

• Print source material pages for workshop attendees
• Buy markers or whiteout strips, etc. for the workshop
• Design the layout of the anthology collection (using a software like Draft2Digital or an alternative)
• Print the anthology collection (using IngramSpark or alternative)
• Marketing materials to promote purchases of the final product (and the proceeds would go back to DSQO)

***

The president liked the idea and submitted a grant to cover the printing costs for the collection!

Now we wait and see!

Update as of May 11, 2026: We got the grant! The three-hour workshop has been scheduled for August 25, 2026. Stay tuned for more details.

An Interview of ME by Ela Thier

I was interviewed by Ela Thier for Writer’s Digest to promote her book, which I edited, called How to Fail as an Artist: My Best Tips.

Her title, “Why My Editor Kept Abandoning My Book,” draws from the comments I made in the margins of her manuscript that said I kept getting ideas for things to work on, that I was having to fight to press on with her edit because it had already achieved its goal: It inspired me to create.

After our interview, Ela asked me to send her a list of everything I’ve worked on since reading her book, and I sent her this via email:

• I redesigned my website and started a monthly blog, partly to hold myself accountable for creating consistently
• I am now a regular contributor on Reedsy Discovery, writing reviews on advanced reader copies (this is my fourth month contributing!)
• I wrote an essay called “Biography of X: An Unintentional Nonbinary Manifesto.”
• I wrote a film analysis called “The Substance: All Metaphor, All the Time, as Self-Harm Catharsis.”
• “The Best and Worst Horror Movies of 2025“
• “Beyond Genre: The 4 Best Movies of 2025“
• I wrote a short narrative nonfiction piece called “Ode to ‘Gwenivere’” and read it in front of a live audience
• I finally finished a narrative nonfiction piece called “Nobody Is Going to Save the Airplane” that I have been working on since 2022, and I have started shopping it around to literary magazines
• I completed six poems and started shopping them around too
• I was inspired to start tinkering with a narrative nonfiction piece that I have been working on, on and off, since 2010 called “God, the Powerful Wizard.”
• I outlined my memoir with a new focus and a new working title, “Fiction Envy.”
• I outlined and have started drafting a book called “Surviving Your Trauma-Healing Memoir: Writing and Editing without Retraumatizing Yourself,” if nothing else as encouragement to myself when I get overwhelmed working on my own memoir. (I didn’t say this in the call, but the parts of your book that encouraged me to do this were when you start to write about your teenage years and 120-Year-Old Ela tells you to just write the highlights, or when you go to write about Yayne, but you end up writing about the Barbie movie. Those hiccups when you’re writing something hard are so real!)

Also, books I read that encouraged me to create personas for my “parts,” along with your book, were Everwoven by Megan Margherio and Are You Mad at Me? by Meg Josephson.

***

And then she gave me this very sweet response:

Amazing. Thank you! And thank you, especially, for all the incredible work that you’ve been doing! xo

I’ll let y’all know when the article comes out!

Update as of May 17, 2026: Ela published the piece in Writer’s Digest! Read “My Editor Kept Abandoning My Book—Because It Drove Them to Get Back to Their Own Writing” here.

Writing and Submitting (and Getting Rejected)

I finished another draft of “God, the Powerful Wizard,” one of the narrative nonfiction pieces I mentioned I was working on back in December. I also wrote a personal-essay-as-literary-criticism called “Half His Age: An Uncomfortable Moral Gray in the Discussion on Age-Gap Relationships” about Jennette McCurdy’s first novel. I started shopping both pieces around, on top of the pieces I mentioned last month.

At this point, I think it’s best to just show you some screenshots of my Submittable dashboard to offer updates/proof that I am Doing the Dance:

Beyond Submittable, I also submitted “Nobody Is Going to Save the Airplane” to Moonday Mag and my piece on Half His Age to Lit Hub, but they did not want those either.

But!

I received two encouraging rejection letters that I’m super proud of, one from Ilanot Review for “Nobody Is Going to Save the Airplane” and one from Brevity (!!!! Big deal!) for “Sheet Music.” 

(I’m just now noticing the time stamp on this one, and it has me giggling. This editor was grinding at 3 a.m., bless them.)

I know the font is small, so here’s the best part in large print:

We enjoyed reading your submission and found much to admire.

And the one from Brevity was also heartening:

We wanted you to know that our readers considered your essay closely.

And they did! “Sheet Music” was labeled “In-Progress” for weeks, despite the piece being less than 300 words.

Fellow writers also Doing the Dance of submitting will know these encouraging rejections are a big compliment. There are three tiers of letters that literary mags send:

1. General rejection (“This wasn’t for us.”),
2. Encouraging rejection (“We liked this, but it’s not a good fit”), and
3. Acceptance (“We’ll take it!”).

Submission is truly a numbers game. Chill Subs posted this on Instagram:

We must keep going! We have to believe in ourselves before other people will even have the chance to believe in us too.

To remind myself (and to flex a little) that I have gotten many a creative piece accepted, here are links to my:

• Poetry + Creative Works,
• Personal Essays + Op-Eds, and
• Screenplays

(I’m considering reformatting the first two pages to Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Fiction Prose, creating three pages total. Just a head-up, in case you come back and you’re like, THIS IS NOT AS ADVERTISED.)

Book Editing

I have been absolutely HUSTLING lately.

Like submitting pieces to literary journals, landing freelance work is also a numbers game. I only score about one-fourth of the editing requests that come my way. 

I turned in a BUNCH of sample edits to prospective clients in late February and early March, thinking about a fourth of them would accept my offers.

Way more people than anticipated accepted my offers!

I edited two books last month (and you can read about them on this other blog post), and I have three more manuscripts to edit in the month of April. I am BLESSED and excited and fulfilled.

I am also STRESSED, though, because my full-time job is hosting its 40th anniversary party/fundraiser in May, and we are scrambling to turn a vision into reality. What a time to choose to work EXTRA.

But too much fulfilling work is a great problem to have. I love to be employed. Mashallah.

I also created social media accounts, so I can promote my work on other platforms:

• Bluesky
• Goodreads
• Letterboxd

I’ve had LinkedIn for a minute now, but I have newly added that link to my website too.

Want to hire me to edit your memoir or novel? I’ll carve out time for you.