The Ramblings Of A Creature Of Hobbit

Challenge #1

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.
Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.

For me I think it's going to be easier to set myself some goals for the second half of the year, rather than focusing on July, bearing in mind that my July involves two trips during which I'll be less online. So, I'll start with finally finishing that Dark series that I started at the tail end of 2023 and then got stuck on because I keep being drawn back to the conclusion that I wanted to avoid (brief spoiler-lite context: once I had more of an understanding of the timelines of this show, I understood that giving this character his happy ending just wasn't possible). I also would quite like to do something with a School Spirits plot bunny that could turn into a series (bit complicated to explain if you didn't watch season 2). And I also keep saying I'll go back to Lost's "Sun went back to 1977" series which I haven't touched since 2010 (Smokey McSmokeFace, that one's on you. Well, technically the writers, for going in the direction that I was not okay with.)

I'm getting the to-watch list down a bit, but still going to keep that one (I find that easier when I'm properly able to focus, meaning NOT in the middle of a heatwave which for some reason seemed to hit me harder the last two days even more so than 2022 did and left me not feeling like doing anything much. In that state, I can handle old favourites I'm familiar with, but not so good with something fairly new to me.

Ever since Isabella and Isla presented me with a Make Your Own Luna Lovegood crochet kit for Christmas (and that was 2022, so it's been a while) and I didn't like to admit that I'm clueless about it, I've thought I should get round to starting. Maybe this will be the year I get round to it.


I may not do both prompts all the way through, but here's a creative response:

Title: But I Still Need Love 'Cause I'm Just A Man
Fandom: School Spirits
Characters: Wally
Pairing: Wally/Maddie
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers all the way through Season 2
Summary: Wally knows he couldn't expect Maddie to stay with him; he envisions how she could have ended up resenting him if she'd chosen to remain a ghost to be with him, but also can't regret that he's spoken up about what he wants for once.



Sometimes Wally had imagined a scenario where Maddie decided to stay there with him, decided not to reclaim her body and live the life outside Split River High that all the other ghosts could only dream of. He knew the other ghosts all thought it would have been unfair of him to ask it of her; Rhonda was right, Maddie should never have been there. Yuri, someone who knew him less well than the others who’d engaged in that waste of time support group, had been the only one who’d felt able to call him out on it to his face, although he knew Rhonda and Charley and probably Quinn also held that view. (Janet, on the other hand, was the one person Wally knew he was never going to discuss it with; it had been as a result of Janet’s actions that Maddie and Wally had had the chance to meet in the first place, to form their relationship. At one point, Wally had found himself wondering whether it would be easier for him if Janet had never possessed Maddie and he’d never got to know her, but he couldn’t regret that their relationship had happened. But still, Janet wasn’t someone he could confide in right now.)

And deep down, Wally did know that it would have been unfair of him to have pushed the issue and argued harder for Maddie to stay with him; he could picture the scene now, Maddie staying, on the surface them being happy together, but then something would have happened like she’d have been watching Simon, Nicole, Xavier and Claire graduate and been thinking of how she could have made the choice to graduate with them, to leave town with Simon and Nicole as they’d been planning. And there it would have been in her eyes, that resentment she would have ended up feeling towards Wally, having made that choice to sacrifice her dreams to stay a ghost and be with him. Wally knew this full well; he could still remember graduation day when his own class had walked across the stage, when he’d heard all about the scholarships his former teammates were getting, and even though he didn’t even want to continue with soccer post-high school, the scholarships already looked more appealing to him than the prospect of being stuck in this hellhole for eternity. He’d felt that resentment himself; how could he not understand that Maddie may feel the same?

Or maybe it would have been her mother; Wally knew she had turned up at the school a few times, some times more sober than others, just wanting answers about what happened to Maddie. He also knew that their relationship had been tense before Janet had taken over Maddie’s body; if Maddie had made the choice to stay with him, Wally knew she would never have had the opportunity to try and work on rebuilding her relationship with Sandra, and she could have ended up resenting him for that as well.

And Maddie had the chance of a future, a career, the chance to see more of the world than just Split River High; even if she had wondered at one point whether Janet had deserved that chance more, to do something with her scientific interests that her father probably wouldn’t have let her do in the 1950s even if she had lived, Maddie equally deserved the chance to live, to do something with her life. Maybe she didn’t know what that would be; a lot of people didn’t know at that age. But if Wally had insisted she stay, she would never have the chance to find out.

Yet at the same time, there was another part of Wally that didn’t entirely regret the fact that he’d spoken out about the fact that he really wanted Maddie to stay. For so many years, he’d spent a lot of his life trying to please other people, continuing to play soccer even though he knew it wasn’t what he really wanted, just because it was a big deal for his parents, or all the times he’d gone along with his teammates’ stupid pranks on the less popular kids, never questioning that until he’d become friends with Charley. Much as he knew that telling Maddie she had to take the chance at going back to life again had been the right thing to do, and Wally knew that one of the other occasions would probably have been a better time to speak up for what he wanted rather than what he felt he should go along with to please others, at least now he knew that he could speak up, that he could state his own wishes rather than whatever he felt he had to say and do.