@glademother. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect a username to carry so much weight to it, especially when I made that user as a mere 16-year-old with an unhealthy obsession for The Maze Runner; though, my username went through several trials before I landed there.
Even so, my eyes brim with tears as I scroll through messages from nearly a decade ago, as glademother was the beginning of everything I would hope to become. I so-wittingly came up with that name after labelling myself as "Mama Newt" on an old Instagram fan account that I ran with a friend, probably better known as "Papa Min Min" by my early readers. The whirlwind of cringe mixed with cherished nostalgia is insurmountable, but that's what comes with digital footprints. (Learn from my mistakes, then laugh at them, too.)
I remember when I would most often guise myself as glademother. I was 18-years-old, seated at an outside table at my junior college, and I had claimed that spot in a three-hour gap between courses, multiple days a week, with an unspoken authority. The table was made of uneven wooden planks that squared around a wide tree, and the tree would greet me with dead leaves that fluttered onto the scribbled jargon that was my homework—homework that I only had so much of, and thus The Other Side was born, along with countless nights of teasing chapters to a dear friend across the States.
It had been a while since I had found myself genuinely swept away within my own writing, aside from all of the hours that I had been secretly pouring into The Bohemian Trials with my sister, Gwen, for nearly two years. I'd hop onto the tall, uncomfortably stiff stool that would wobble on the misaligned concrete, turn my phone's brightness to the dimmest setting, set a timer for 10 minutes before my next class, and then let myself slip into the shoes of (y/n).
(y/n), the abbreviated entity for your name. I have a love-hate relationship with her. The decision to write in the reader's perspective was to make the character as personal to my readership as possible, to make audiences feel her yearning, her hope, her pain. Of course, this choice has come with complications. For one, (y/n) does not, and cannot, always perfectly align with every single reader of this story in every thought and action, but that is the beautiful tragedy: humans are far too sundry, uniquely and perfectly designed to be balled up into claustrophobic diction and behavior. It's a conflict worth taking.
However, for some, that (y/n), The Other Side, and even my 18-year-old-self, are not the beginning. A portion of my readership here may remember the title The Mistake, which has ironically proven to fit its name. That was me at 16 years old, and in truth, the writing was terrible. Chapters would hardly hit a couple hundred words, the leading (y/n) had very little direction, and the ending was nothing short of one big deus ex machina (meaning "God from the machine", which stemmed from Ancient Greek plays having deities conveniently intervene as the resolution). My deux ex machina was named Jared, and he was from Group C. How riveting. Yet, even then, a handful of my readers were cheering me on from the sidelines, messaging me with love for my work and telling me that I should become a writer.
That is who I was, and this is what I have become: I am a writer and copyeditor, turned 25 this year, am happily married, and have just sent in the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) to the company that my sister and I will be working with in printing our original manga-like graphic novel series, The Bohemian Trials. Looking ahead to the the soon fulfillment of the dream that I have had since I was 13, the dream to be a published writer, I find myself digging down to my roots, to the place where author Chesslyn Wright began in the rich soil of my former, naive self: glademother.
The Lord has truly blessed me with readers such as you and with the opportunity to write the works you read, even if it is a silly fan fiction. It is because of readers like you that The Other Side remains as impactful as it did when I released it week-by-week many years ago, from 2017 to 2018, so much so that there remain nights where I have to flip my phone face down and silence it to prevent disturbances from frequent Wattpad notifications. Then, a quiet 18-year-old girl wrote a 800+ page fan fiction of The Maze Runner; today, that very girl is the woman who copyedits that story with the certification to back it up.
Thank you for your endless support, and I hope you enjoy the revival of a fan fiction that is incredibly near and dear to my heart, as I am officially beginning chapter-by-chapter copyediting of this story, 7 years following its publication.
Sincerely,
Chess / glademother
YOU ARE READING
The Other Side - A Newt Fanfiction
Fanfiction{Book 1 of 3} (y/n) and Aris have been stuck at WICKED's facility for days on end, and the meals are beginning to drag on, now that the rest of Group B has either been taken to Janson's promised paradise or disappeared. Although WICKED has been supp...
