#struckbyniall

[still-niall]

struckbyniall replied to your post: So, the lovely @flavorednarry tagged me (thank...

lolllll number 8 is relatable

“oh wow so you must do so much chemistry” “so how often are you in the lab” “you’re basically a chemist right”

lmao you know the pain! be prepared cause those questions won’t stop even until you’ve been working for years 

[farfromthstars]

9, 19 and a question that's not at all relevant but needs to be asked: what has niall been up to this past month? catch me up on what i've missed 😂

9. Best month for you this year?

hmm, maybe february? i was still in granada for my semester abroad for half of it, getting a taste of spring and having fun with my friends there, went on a trip to morocco with my best friend and then flew home and saw my family and friends there again :)

already did 19 earlier, as for your biggest question:

niall wrapped up the flicker sessions and gave us a whole lot of funny ramblings, a cover of dancing in the dark and perfect performances ( x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x )

went and performed at the cmas with maren morris ( x | x | x )

became a model??? ( x | x  )

did a few instagram lives ( x | x ) (i think i tagged everything about that #insta live if you wanna see more)

he wore a three piece suit, performed and won an ama for best new artist and made everyone ship him with shawn mendes in the process ( x | x | x | x | x )

he went on the jingle bell ball tour and made everyone fall in love with him there, plus he reunited with liam ( x | x | x | x | x | x | x )

went on fallon and the late late show ( x | x | x )

this nouis rap battle thing also happened ( x | x )

honorary mention to the arthur shirt because you’ve already seen that ( x | x | x )

[thunderoad]

have you written anything about why you love the goldfinch? i live for reading people gush about something they enjoy

I have not!! but gosh, there was SO MUCH to love?? thank you for asking!! I went into it having read the secret history and the little friend, donna tartt’s other novels, so I knew she was going to build another massive, beautifully fleshed-out world with really intriguing, developed characters! her setting descriptions are absolutely, unbelievably textured and vivid and gorgeous. a big chunk of the novel is set in Las Vegas, and you can practically feel that desert dust sticking to your skin and the heat baking the breath out of your lungs. 

of all the characters she’s written before, too, I think Theo and Boris are my favorites. the little friend stars a 12yo girl at its center, and the child’s voice was so, so strong and accurate in that book, but she’s not quite permitted to have the same depth of understanding as tartt’s adult protagonists, so I think she captured the best of both worlds with Theo and Boris by having them grow up over the course of the novel. you get the sense of knowing both of them so well that they’re like friends, even though they’re both…well, not actually good people. their friendship was also really, really great to read about as well; they’re essentially the only person in each other’s lives who care about them, so they develop this very intense, youthful bond. tartt’s so great at writing friendships and she never undervalues them, which is rare and precious. 

and I think a consequence of having a child as your narrator, the way tartt’s done with Theo in The Goldfinch, is this element of the fantastical that’s there from the very start and lingers all throughout the rest of the novel. even the way boris calls theo ‘potter,’ as in Harry Potter, invokes a sense of the children’s capacity not just to believe in magic but to create it, as well, through these compressed, distorted cognitive processes; there’s this great bit in the little friend where Harriet, the 12yo, is looking at a picture of the fabulous house where her great-aunts used to live until it burnt down, and in her imagination it comes to life many times greater than it was in reality. but that’s the wonder of kids; they haven’t fully outgrown the fantastical, so they bring it into the world. 

I also thought it had one of the best articulated artistic theses I’ve ever read?? like, I think a lot of novels - especially novels about writing, or ones about art, which this one is - are developing an artistic ethos that answers the very writerly questions of ‘why do we write? what does it mean? what am I doing it for? does anybody really care?’ I loved the way these questions are sort of redirected through the medium of art and develop over the course of the novel until you emerge at the end with a very firm, very clear understanding of exactly why any of it matters. and I don’t think you’d get the same understanding if you didn’t power through all thousand pages of that giant book, which is a huge accomplishment in itself, u know? making that kind of a buildup pay off. I haven’t read many novels that paid off in a way that made the whole long journey worth so much more than the sum of its parts, but this one absolutely did. it was a complete pleasure to read. 

[farfromthstars]

@struckbyniall replied to your post “i have two and a half fics i’m working on (half because idk if that...”

�� can you say more about the fics

they’re both very much in the ideation phase still so i’d rather not say too much and also one of them is gonna be for the 1dcollab if i sign up for that but the long one is very probably gonna be a ziall road trip/world trip in a sort of AU (too different to be canon divergence but 1d does exist) and the other one is gonna be grimmy/niall fake dating ahhh

[farfromthstars]

happy birthday sweetheart! hope you have a wonderful day ❤

thank you so much emma ❤️❤️

[still-niall]

struckbyniall replied to your post “struckbyniall replied to your post: So, the lovely @flavorednarry...”

�� i also love the glazed look on people's faces when they ask what i do

haha yeah I feel you! 

[still-niall]

struckbyniall replied to your post “oh no”

good luck!

ah, thanks! 

[brokendrums]

struckbyniall replied to your post “I start teaching tomorrow and I am SO UNPREPARED. everyone is like,...”

i bet you'll be great!

thank you! i just need to get my nerves under control!!

valencing replied to your post “I start teaching tomorrow and I am SO UNPREPARED. everyone is like,...”

bb u will be absolutely FINE

ahhh, val, thank you so much for all your comments. i’ve everything printed and a list of all the things i want to talk about, i don’t want it to sound too scripted. i’m so bad at prepping etc. i just put things i don’t want to do off and i can’t avoid this anymore lol. i do it for everything in work that i hate and it makes me stress out everytime but i always seem to do it anyway :/ i’m just really hoping i won’t get flustered or mess it up somehow. i’m bad at giving things away with my expressions like rolling my eyes and things without realising it so that’s high on my worst-case-scenarios haha (along with literally anything else that could go wrong)