We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mark Hofmann a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Mark, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Going back to the beginning – how did you come up with the idea in the first place?

Sure thing. My latest book, “Good Mourning! A Guide to Biting the Big One…and Dying, Too”, is my first book for the publishing company, Starlit Waters Publishing, and was released in October 2023. The idea for the book, unfortunately, was a tragic one as my father suddenly died in July 2018 of a fatal heart attack while fishing. Now, when a loved one passes away, the family and friends go through the grieving process, and I was no different; however, where I branched away from the norm was because of my weekly humor column for a local newspaper. I’ve always taken an absurd angle to many everyday things with the humor column being the perfect outlet.
Death, it seemed, was no different.
Soon, I started noticing different aspects of death and everything surrounding it–from the layout of funeral homes and psychics to cemeteries and the afterlife.
So those ideas started piling up in my head, and I started thinking something would make a pretty good humor column and then something else would happen that would also make a good humor column. Soon, I had enough material for about three months worth of humor columns, which is good for meeting deadlines, but would produce the most depressing run of a column in the history of journalism…maybe not as dark as the Joseph Pulitzer Manifesto of Rage and Indecency (just kidding).
Anyway, I sat down two weeks after my dad died and started writing “Good Mourning!”.
Now they say writing is a form of therapy, and I think the writing process yielded some good things out of a dire situation, but I think, overall, it was my skewed sensibilities that find humor in, well, everything, even in the darkest corners of life.
I’ve been asked if “Good Mourning!” is a good resource for those who are grieving the loss of a loved one. I think it’s not for someone emotionally crushed by a loss or someone looking for answers to make sense of a senseless world. My book is for anybody who may be a bit down and needs a good laugh or two on a subject many consider to still be taboo, yet is something we all have in common. What I’m trying to say is that humor isn’t the best medicine–I’d say Penicillin, perhaps aspirin, is certainly a better medicine than humor.
Humor, however, does make a pretty good topical ointment.

Mark, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

It may come as a surprise, but I actually hated to read as a kid. It got to the point where my reading and writing was so bad that I was placed in the remedial reading program throughout elementary school and middle school. I just didn’t get it. “To be or not to be”? Well, make up your mind, pal, I have video games to play! Then something clicked in my mind when I entered high school. I thought that girls like a guy who liked to read and presented himself as an intelligent man, so I decided to read a novel, but it would be one of my choosing, not required reading. I then obtained a library card and checked out the book “It” by Stephen King. Why, as my first big-boy novel, did I pick one over 1,000 pages long? I don’t know. Maybe I picked it because of its size, and you know what they say about the size of the guy’s book he’s reading…that he has no life. Of course, I grossly miscalculated and found out that the girls really wanted the football players and the other jocks. However, by that time, I’ve fallen in love with reading. Besides, I already had the library card and it’d be a shame to waste it.
As with most people who begin a reading journey and have some creativity in them, I came to a realization that I, too, can write this stuff…until I first tried it with awful results. Like this excerpt from my first sci-fi novel; “Dan woke up one morning, but his wife, who he is married to, wasn’t by his side. He freaked the hell out. She wasn’t in the house and outside there was no one either. He wondered to himself if it had anything to do with the radioactive comet that was seen over the night sky last night that he saw on the news. Maybe, just maybe, it was that!!!!”
But I kept reading and writing and while in college, a writing professor asked me what I wanted to do professionally and when I said, “I wanna be a novelist soooooooooo bad!” He asked if I had “developmental problems” and then asked if I was independently wealthy. I’ll leave it up to the readers what my answers were, but my professor suggested I get into the newspaper business and write on the side, which is exactly what I wound up doing and still doing to this day.
While at the newspaper, I started submitting stories for a column that all the reporters could contribute if they wanted to. I made my columns funny and kept submitting them week after week until I was virtually the only one doing so. Finally, one of the editors approached me and asked if I would like my own humor column because that was a cheaper solution than a cease and desist order.
Judging by the hate mail I received, I deemed my column a success and that resulted in my first book, “Stupid Brain”, a collection of my columns and sold as an ebook at Amazon and other digital publishing outlets.
I did the same with “Good Mourning!”, but one day I saw a local publishing company, Starlit Waters Publishing, was being established, and I decided to contact the publisher to see if she wanted to sign me on…or else!
And the rest, well, is history as she wanted to reprint “Good Mourning!” as a paperback book that can be purchased on Amazon or by visiting the publisher’s website at www.starlitwaters.com/books
I currently have a multi-book deal with Starlit Waters with a novel as my next project titled “Living Will” and then a critical, yet immature, look at the alien riffraff that pollutes the galaxy titled “Scumbags of the Universe”.
And the best is yet to come!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

For me, it’s less of a specific story and more of a theme, well, two themes: Love and Stupidity. As with reading, I have a love of writing. It truly takes me away from everything. When my fingers are typing, when my eyes are on the screen, that becomes my world. Everything else fades out–worries, fears, responsibilities, my screaming kid, my nagging wife, my misbehaving dogs, smoke alarms blaring away in the house, chest pains and shortness of breath–and I’m in my element.
The stupidity part comes from me continuing to write and submit after rejection after rejection. Sure, when you get knocked down, it hurts and your pride is bruised. You realize that putting your stuff out there is like spitting prose in an ocean of words. There’s always that chance a mermaid may taste your spit and be into that kind of thing, wash up on shore and the both of you can go on a wacky 80’s rom-com adventure like the movie “Splash”, but you are aware it could be as meaningless like the TV-made sequel “Splash Too”.
So, it’s either I continue to write despite rejections because my love of writing has made me stupid or stupidity has caused my love of writing. It’s the classic chicken vs. egg debate or nature vs. nurture or if Batman created his villains or if the villains created Batman.
You see, it…you know what? I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. Let’s just say you must continue to write and submit your work and to hell with roadblocks in your way. If you love to write, nothing should derail you. Keep writing and block out the rest of the world.
Just pay attention to the smoke alarm. I learned that Lesson the hard way.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Beyond the joy of creating a work that I previously mentioned, it’s the feedback I get from the reader. For my chosen genre, that’s laughter. I may not see them laugh (full disclosure, every 50th book I sell, I personally stalk the buyer and watch them read it so I can see if they laugh at the book), but if they say it’s funny and they couldn’t stop laughing, then I feel the upmost satisfaction a writer can get (and if they’re one of the customers I stalk and if I know they’re lying to me, I call them out on it). They’re also a sense of satisfaction when you see your finished project as a whole or if you read through it and feel that it’s ready to leave the nest and go out in the nasty world. No matter how good you think it is, there’s always something in your head that says, “It’s not perfect…and you’re out of paper towels.” And that’s the other side of the coin; it’s never going to be perfect and you can tinker with it forever and never be completely happy with it. I remember reading that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was still editing “2001: A Space Odyssey” something like 25 years after it was released. Now THAT’S a director’s cut!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mark.w.hofmann?igsh=MXF1cXFveHgybGdnZg==
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• Other: https://www.starlitwaters.com/our-authors/