Sal-u-ta-tions!

My name is Lewis Medeiros. Yes, that is my real name. I've tried my hand at posting fanfiction under other names before, but here I am at last, writing more. My current obsession is my "Laurel Potter: The Girl Who Lived" story, an alternate-timeline story in which a female, Slytherin-aligned Potter child with a tendency to tell lies a little too casually took Harry's place and very obviously derailed things from the word go. I am also writing a Persona 5 fan-novel that deposits my longtime forum roleplay character Kyo into the game's events and tries to see what would happen if her presence there radically altered the chain of events leading into the story of the Phantom Thieves as we know it. As you can see, I have a mild obsessive fascination with alternate timelines and the logical implications of "butterfly effect" fiddling with the canonical elements of a story. I do not, however, subscribe to many widely-accepted "fanon" writing conventions where they appear in series like Harry Potter or Naruto, and as a result you won't see many commonly-accepted things cropping up in the stories on this channel (like, say, Noble and Ancient House etiquette in Potter stories, or the civilian council in Naruto stories).

Introductions, introductions... I'm a 31-year-old guy from New Jersey in the United States of America, no one special. I work alongside three other like-minded nerds as a commentator on the BrainScratch Commentaries YouTube channel, and I have a Twitter which I am very active one (be wary of political tangents). I also participate on play-by-post Shin Megami Tensei: Persona roleplay forums called Persona Rebirth and Persona: Mindscapes, where I and my friends do basically the same thing people do here except with a lot more interactivity. That first one is also where Kyo from Tokyo Butterfly was born! So there is that.

I am currently jobless. The COVID-19 pandemic happening right after I quit Amazon did not exactly do good things for my job-hunting prospects.

The only story that I have written under a previous pen name which I like (or, well, don't hate) enough to not have erased from existence is The Whims of Fate, which I wrote under the name "That's Professor Hawke" back in 2011. I got sidetracked and eventually abandoned it, thankfully at the conclusion of a story arc rather than in the middle of one, so it remains a fairly complete-ish glimpse into the beginnings of my obsession with alternate timeline fanfiction... although, I can't exactly say I like how I wrote the characters and it was written before I learned to detest fanon, so elements of that managed to creep into it. I have no desire to continue the existing story, although I may recycle the concepts from it that I feel still hold up, someday.

- updated on May 18th, 2020

Status Report as of May 18th, 2020:

One would think that having so much free time during the COVID-19 pandemic would have made this a good time to write a bunch of fanfiction, but in truth this has been a stressful time for me and I haven't been able to focus much on it. That said, after a 216-hour playthrough of Persona 5 Royal, I have made my decisions about how to continue Tokyo Butterfly and I still have ideas on where to go with the "Laurel Potter" story, as well. I can't make any promises as to exactly when I will continue posting those stories. That said, I also want to go through Tokyo Butterfly's existing chapters and clean them up a little, and then cross-post them to Archive of Our Own — a website that I have a love-hate relationship with, if I'm being honest. "AO3," as it is called, is wonderful for posting stories but which has an absolutely god-awful layout when it comes to looking for things to read... and which seems to have been flooded with smut and crackfic nonsense lately, making this problem even worse. But there is little reason for me not to post my stories there, since it's easy enough to do and the formatting options are even better than they are here. (You can evenly justify text, for one thing. Thank you, AO3.)

Stories Cross-Posted to Archive of Our Own:

I eventually intend to post all of my work to Archive of Our Own as well as here, as the formatting options and e-book downloads on that site make it slightly better for posting and reading stories. This site's a bit weird about profile hyperlinks (they may just link back to the profile page you're looking at now no matter what the URL that I enter in happens to be!) so unfortunately you have to copy/paste the URL if you want to see the AO3 versions of my stories. Simply paste the following at the end of the URL after the "org" in AO3's web address.

Laurel Potter: The Girl Who Lived
Series: /series/1548946
Book 1: /works/21489808

My Pottermore Profile:

- Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff
- Ilvermorny House: Thunderbird
- Patronus Form: Hyena
- Wand: Holly and dragon heartstring, twelve and a half inches, slightly springy