Oliver A. Hoffmann

your book is interesting and i love them, anyway i published a new story can u read it?

Wattpad is disabling the messaging feature (oh well), so I’ll just leave my social media links here in case you want to reach out!
          
          I’m most likely to respond here
          IG: @olle_view
          
          I’ve started posting my music here:
          YouTube (music): @olle_music
          
          Or send me an email! Social networks come and go, and only emails are forever:
          oliver.ana.hoffmann@gmail.com

Hey!
          I read Wattpad books often, so sometimes authors of books that I find reach out. I wanted to quickly answer the most common questions (this somehow feels like I'm a bigger fish than I really am, haha)
          
          1. You DON'T have to read my book if I read yours. As far as I understood, this is somewhat of an unspoken rule of the community. So, I solemnly release you from this duty!
          - That's not why I read other books;
          - My book is pretty weird (this sounds pretentious, I know), its language gets sometimes too pretentious (I do my best to keep it simple, but it still happens), and it often references classical literature, including Russian (I told you I was pretentious), so not everyone is going to like it. Watching people having to force themselves to read it is uncomfortable;
          
          2. Please, don't ask me for reviews!
          I don't always have things to say, and reviewing takes time that I don't really have right now—I can't even always reply to comments on my own book;
          
          3. If I've been reading your book for a while and then stopped, it might have happened that I simply lost it and couldn't find it again. Feel free to remind me in a DM!
          
          4. However, if I liked the first chapter of your book, and didn't keep reading, it might also be the case that I didn't like it. I often star the first chapter of a book before I even read it: for example, if I was intrigued by the description, title, or tags. This way a book is saved to my reading list, and I can take a look when I have some time. And sometimes, when I do, I find out that the book is just not my cup of tea.
          
          5. My only active social media is Instagram. Probably, if you subscribe to me there, I'll subscribe back.
          
          6. I rarely follow back on Wattpad though, and usually only people who I had a chat in DMs with, and who I got along with.
          
          Sorry for this wall of text, and nice to meet you!

Six months in, six chapters and six hours of read time—the first half of Serpents and Stairways has been published! Thanks to everyone who’s following along on this journey!

When I think of Proust’s Combray, a very specific image comes to my mind.
          
          If you’ve ever seen the 3D map of the known universe, you might’ve been surprised that it is shaped like an hourglass, with Earth right in the middle. This is not poignant commentary on how brief our time is, nor does this reflect something about the actual universe—symmetrical, omnipresent. Instead, the missing parts are in the “shadow” of our galaxy, it’s too dense, bright and noisy for us to look through it, and so everything we see is located off the galactic plane, “up” and “down” from it.
          
          But this image causes in me a strange inversion in feeling: that it’s not the light of the distant (and ancient) stars that washes us from all directions, but that it’s the Earth that’s reaching out and touching with telescopes and interferometers whatever universe it can.
          
          The madelaine—is a telescope, too—one pointed backwards in time as well, a narrow sampling window, through which Marcel only sees whatever space-time he could see from aunt Léonie’s window on the day to which he is momentarily transported. Memories and associations explode in long chains of galactic filament, but how much of the universe of his childhood remains occluded, obscured, obliviated, awaiting another coincidence to open another window and expand the map. Of course, only where it is possible to expand. 
          
          There is another hourglass in cosmology: the hyper-hourglass of all the light that could ever reach us, and everything beyond it—exists, but is fundamentally unknowable. And like with the real universe, for Marcel there exists an event horizon, or rather a non-event horizon, beyond which lie the streets and villas and neighbours that he could never remember, for he had never met them.
          
          And when I think of Proust’s Combray I can’t help but think of all the roads I hadn’t explored back then, where I can no longer go.

Imagine, a Silicon Valley software engineer on a Saturday night, when they really ought to have better things to do, decides that the letter Z is sorely redundant and just creates confusion for everyone. Sinze zey don’t uze it, zey should loze it, zey say and remove it from Google Docs orthography checker.
          
          Imagine the red underlying your zeroes and zebras. Having to click “ignore misspelling” every time you want to spell Analyze the way you want. How many clicks would it take for you to give up and start typing “sero sebras analysed”? A hundred? A zillion? This zealotry aside,  there is a problem with letting machines spell- and grammar- check us. In case of orthography—it crystalyzes the way we write, preventing it from adapting to the way we talk.
          
          But let’s talk punctuation. At its most basic, childish, simplistic, punctuation—is the way we breathe. It captures the way we pause, stop, wait, hold our breath in suspense, and exhale in satisfaction. Yet, a machine lacks lungs, it reads and writes relentlessly, and has to rely on rules to know which clause to comma, and which—not. And there’s nothing wrong with rules, but that—is all it’s got. It doesn’t hear the subtle pause of a semicolon, doesn’t feel the side-eye of parentheses, cannot see the way a well-placed dash merges the reader into the new lane, and how a misplaced (even if accurate) comma causes crashes.
          
          The rules are important, and I’ll admit, I really need to know them better before I start breaking them. But I’d advise against defaulting to spell checkers and apps like grammarly. The punctuation is an art, it’s audible, visible, it is tactile, it is a part of your voice. If Dickinson could use nothing but em dashes—then so can we.

Huhu! Sprichst du deutsch?

It’s not easy coming  up with a title for an enigmatic old king that ruled through magic. 
          
          Wizard King sounds like a Gandalf, Witch King is taken, and Witcher King evokes a certain silver-haired man. Warlock King sounds too intense, and Sorcerer King is more ancient than old. Enchanter King was the one I liked most—hadn’t been overused, gives a better idea of the kind of magic the king was known for, and I like that it’s etymologically related to incantations and nightingales—the root of the word meaning “to sing.”
          
          Finally, there were, apparently, Enchanter Kings in a 1993 comic about Sonic the Hedgehog, of all places. “Three middle-aged foxes, known as powerful enchanters.” If that’s not good company, I don’t know what is?..

 Sorry for bothering, but I wondered if you are active on social media? If yes, I would love to subscribe there too! I'm sharing my worldbuilding artwork on Instagram and have a accompanying channel on YouTube for Crowlight. 

A new part of “Serpents and Stairways” is out! There is a lot of research that went into it, and even more that just didn’t fit in. 
          
          Here’s an amazing fact. “Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers” was a 1874 book, by an American doctor, on dangers of using arsenic if home decoration, that contained 86 samples of arsenic-containing wallpaper… the book was so toxic only 5 copies survived, the other 95 were literally destroyed.
          
          The name, the irony, the history, it’s incredible. And there’s a free full scan of the book! 
          https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/bookviewer?PID=nlm:nlmuid-0234555-bk