Home of Bestselling Author Patrick Wensink

Big news here at Wentastic Enterprises. For the first time Patrick will be in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Pick up a copy of the April 14 paper and check the Inside the List section.

WHISKEY AND WRY: Writing a best seller can be more like holding a winning lottery ticket than most people imagine — not every payout is worth boasting about. That was the message, anyway, of a recent Salon article with the tell-it-like-it-is headline “My Amazon Best Seller Made Me Nothing.”

Read more here.

My friend Michael J. Seidlinger has been going around the interwebosphere, turning people into serial killers in honor of his new novel, My Pet Serial Killer.

So when he asked if he could reimagine me as a cold blooded murderer, I jumped at the chance. Check it out.

Alias/Known As: “The Candy Man”

Real name: Patrick Wensink

Number of victims: 17

Description:

~Posed as an employee of a local sweets/candy shop; used mock-employee status to search for victims.

~Pinpointed victims based on receptiveness to his good-natured communiqués.

~Offered receptive victims chocolate whistles; recorded name/license info of those that took offered whistles.

~Targeted victims at their home locations; constructed chocolate gnomes, window fixtures, and other invasive exterior household items to induce alarm.

~Continued behavior until victims vacated home; subsequently followed victims to temporary housing.

~Disposed of victims and left bodies in threes, each with whistle in mouth.

Be Mine

“Open wide on a mega mall in the heart of what- ever America, due in part to this being a Nothing Ever Happens feature presentation. The mystery pushes a shopping cart and the assumption that it’s about to get a lot worse. The homeless cliché́ turns into hungry consumer cliché́ as the woman wearing her latest purchases – leather and bondage straps, dominatrix garb – enters the darkened mall. Stores are closed. Stores are closed. Every store is closed. But they’re open for the right kind of consumer. The mystery shops with a weapon and open threat to use it (if needed).

Store managers raise the security gates to the sighting of the woman. ‘What can I do for you?’”

The New York Times recently published Patrick’s essay about being a stay-at-home-dad/domestic gigolo. Read it here.

Here’s the beginning:

A romantic Valentine’s is close. Like, broom-closet close. All you need for a sexy good time is a bucket of cleaning supplies and maybe a notary public — depending on how litigious you are. My wife and I are horrible at paperwork, so we struck our deal with a handshake. It was a dubious-sounding pact that went on to revolutionize our marriage: sex for cleaning.

Over at the great lit site, LitReactor, I’ll be leading an online workshop on utilizing improv comedy techniques to be a better writer and overcome writer’s block and maybe make you better in the sack, who knows?

*UPDATE: I am making my students call me either “Professor” or “Your Honor”. It seems to be going over well.

The excellent literary community/magazine LitReactor is giving away a copy of Everything Was Great Until it Sucked as the top prize for their December flash fiction contest.

Learn more here.

The folks at Mashable broke the story.