Photo: copyright Trix Rosen

Alisa Kwitney is a native New Yorker – born, raised and still living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.   She is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut (English major) and of Columbia University’s MFA Fiction Writing Program, where she openly admitted to reading romaance novels and comic books for pleasure. PHOTOS! click here

Her thesis and first novel, Till The Fat Lady Sings (coming soon to this website), was a comedy of manners about university life and women’s illusions about food, weight and romance. It was published in hardcover by HarperCollins in 1991 to glowing reviews (The Sunday NY Times book review, Booklist, Publisher’s Weekly, The Library Journal) and not -so-glowing sales.
 
Her second novel was rejected by everyone with lips.

Alisa consoled herself by getting married to an Englishman in NY, learning to scuba dive (Open Water, Advanced, Deep and Night) and landing every comic fan’s dream -- an editing job at Vertigo, the mature/dark fantasy imprint of DC Comics. For seven years, Alisa enjoyed the luxury of a window office and the indescribable pleasure of being paid to tell other people what she thought.
 
She also wrote some dark fantasy comics and graphic novels in her spare time.
 
Alisa’s next project, the birth of her son Matthew, pretty much spelled the end to any spare time. After the birth of her second child, daughter Elinor, Alisa quit her editing job. A year later, she began writing the kind of sharp, sexy, action-packed romantic comedy she was longing to read. Tapping her fond memories of the tropics, scuba diving and sex, she finished it in nine months and took it to the Romance Writers of America national convention in Washington, DC.
 
At the convention, (where she knew absolutely no one) she met Avon editor Lucia Macro, who recalled reading and enjoying Alisa’s first novel, and had recently looked it up on Amazon to see what had become of its author.
 
Before long, Alisa’s scuba diving caper had a contract as The Dominant Blonde.
 
Alisa spends her time shuttling between Manhattan and Pine Plains, NY with her husband, two children and a Burmese cat with dependency issues. She prefers her love scenes sweaty, her humor dry and her escapist fantasies laced with a dash of something real and just a little dangerous.

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FLIRTING WITH MANHATTAN (August 2007)

Photo: copyright Trix Rosen

Like the heroine of Flirting in Cars, I left Manhattan a couple of years ago for a big old house in the country. And like my heroine, I didn’t go all that willingly. In fact, for years I called it the Green Acres Marital Dilemma: One spouse wants urban pleasures, the other prefers rural delights. After more than a dozen years of living my way, my husband and kids insisted that we experience the latter.

After an adjustment period, I learned to love the country – the springtime when I hike with my Chinook dog, Magnus, the summertime when I check out the fancy chickens at the county fair, the autumn when I volunteer at the local haunted house.

In the winter, I head off to the city a lot.

Well, to be honest, I go back to the city a fair amount even when the weather is fine. But even though I don’t live in Manhattan anymore, I still spend my city days like a native New Yorker. Which means no Broadway plays, no visits to the Empire State building, no major museums unless there is a special exhibit, and absolutely no eating at trendy restaurants, even if they do have those futuristic Japanese toilets in the restroom.

Here follows my extremely subjective guide to where to go and what to do in New York:

Where to Stay:

Absolutely no idea. I stay at my mother’s on the Upper West Side, but this probably won’t work for you. Pay $300 a night in most places in the world and you get a little luxury; in Manhattan, be prepared for mid-level security lockup.

Morning:

Breakfast on the go: The best bagels in NYC? Lenny’s on Broadway and 98th. Yeah, yeah, I know you heard that H&H are the best, but they’re not. Get an oat bran with everything and a shmear of cream cheese and feel semi-virtuous.

Best Brunch: If I have more time, I head on over to Barney Greengrass on Amsterdam and 87th for their legendary smoked fish platters. My mom likes a cup of borscht with hers, but I feel that’s taking things too far. If I’m in a more elegant mood, I might go next door to Popover’s. If you’ve never heard of a popover before, trust me, they are sublime. I have mine with apple butter, (which isn’t really butter).

Mid Morning:

Head on over to Madeleine’s at 134 W 72nd Street to get a cleaning (my skin is too prone to breakouts for a facial). There’s no big sign on the building and you have to walk up a couple of flights of stairs to get to the salon, which gives the whole excursion a slight speakeasy feeling of adventure. Sure, you can go to some fancy shmancy place and pay to have them blow oxygen on your skin, but Madeleine’s offers the kind of high quality, gimmick free service you’d get from family. They’ll also give you family-type honesty (like
telling me when I was overplucking my eyebrows). Have I mentioned they pluck eyebrows, dye eyelashes, bleach those pesky dark hairs around your hairline, and wax those hairs that didn’t get plucked?) Cynthia Nixon goes here, and the girls who work in those nail salons that do waxing sneak up to Madeleine’s in their lunch hour to get their own legs waxed.

Lunch:

Your skin is clear and you’re around the corner from Gray’s Papaya, where celebrity chefs rub shoulders with budget conscious folks on lunch break and newly discharged mental patients as they gobble down the crispy hot dogs and drink papaya juice.

Or else you could stroll up Columbus Avenue – there are lots of cafes and restaurants, along with some of my favorite little clothes boutiques all along the seventies. When I need a dress for a special occasion, I always check out Lianna, where they have infinite variations on the little black number, and the most elegant costume jewelry around.

I’ve Just Noticed My Roots:

Every fashion magazine in America tells you where to go to have your hair cut and colored in NYC, but if you don’t like the idea of some self-assured snipper telling you he knows what’s best, go to Pentomo. It’s so good I break my self-imposed boycott on the East Side to have Jeremiah listen carefully to me as I explain what I want to do this time, and to have Walter painstakingly add just the right amount of highlights.

If the weather is nice, I walk back across the park: You can head into Central Park at 66th street, check out the Central Park Zoo, and walk across to the West Side. At the midway point, there’s the carousel, which goes particularly well with a new cut and highlights.

Okay, Now My Feet Hurt.

One of the best things about Manhattan is that there is always somebody else in the movie theater, no matter how outlandish the time. I love Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, on Broadway and 63th street, where you can see the latest European or Israeli films along with offbeat American indy selections. (Bonus: Good place to pick up foreign guys.)

My Whole Body Hurts.

If I’m not in the mood for a movie, I might head downtown (I do leave the Upper West Side on occasion) to get a hot stone massage at the Great Jones Spa. This is a fun place to go with friends, because you can hang out before or after your spa treatment – they have a steam room, sauna, hot tub and cold plunge pool. Although one friend complains that the place does have a faintly sinister air -- there’s a hint of industrial space underneath all the New Agey touches – I still like it. (Bonus: Good place to pick up Russian entrepreneurs).

For a more yoga-wholistic experience, I go to Carapan, which is a very upscale version of a nuts and granola place. As DVD yoga guru Rodney Yee might say, Feel the inner peace here. Relax your inner eyelids. Relax your groins. (You’re not picking up anyone here.)

To Really Relax Your Groins.

I always like to take my newly divorced pals to a sex shop. Downtown, there’s Babes in Toyland; in midtown, there’s Eve’s Garden, cleverly hidden in an impressively ritzy office building (as featured in a scene in my novel, Does She or Doesn’t She?) Don’t be embarrassed, no one will know you’ve got ben wa balls in your purse…unless you drop them.

Or Maybe You Want to Isolate Your Groins:

For years, I took belly dancing classes at Serena Studios in midtown Manhattan. The beginners’ classes were fun and not in the least intimidating, and brought together a fascinating mix of post-partum Mamas, middle aged movers and shakers, ex-ballet dancers, strippers and women of every shade, shape and level of dance experience. I’m not sure what their current schedule is (you can check online, as with all these places except for Madeleine’s). You can pay for just one lesson, and then go wild and blow your money on a hip scarf with bangles.

Enough With the Groins, Give me Some Culture.

If your ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower, you might pay a visit to the Tenement Museum. The gift shop has some great nostalgic stuff, along with an all too realistic rubber mouse. The recreated slum apartments remind you too much of your hotel? Relax. The best gelato in town is right downstairs at Pharmacy, and Chinatown is just a short walk away.

All Right, Enough Activity. Time for Food and Drink.

If you don’t have a Zagat guide, get one – you can choose a bar or restaurant by neighborhood, type of food, level of poshness or likelihood of picking up somebody cute. You absolutely do not have to pay a lot of money to have an incredible meal in Manhattan, especially if you go ethnic. My advice? Unless you really are too tired to move, pick an regional cuisine – Indian, Vietnamese, Moroccan, Turkish – and let Zagat narrow it down.

Nightlife:

Obviously, there are cooler choices, but if it’s been more than a decade since you last gyrated on a dance floor, you might check out My Totally Awesome Eighties Prom. It’s an Off-Broadway interactive show at the Limelight, scene of many of my youthful follies.

In general, Off and Off-Off Broadway theater is stranger, cheaper and easier to get into on short notice, and some of the selections are anarchically funny. On the other hand, you might also suffer memorably, but this makes a better story than telling people you saw The Drowsy Chaperone.

Hey, Why Didn’t That Cab Stop for Me?

Around 4 pm is when a lot of cabs go off duty and they will not take you anywhere, because they are tired and they have to pee. Do not get stuck in midtown, where everyone wants a cab, at 4 pm if you have to be somewhere in a hurry.

So there you have it – my very biased list of where to go and what to do. Let me know if you have anything to add to the list so I can check it out in my next city day.

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MAKE WAR NOT LOVE? (February 2007)

I feel so betrayed. Here I was, big fan of Maureen Dowd, loving the fact that she looked like Maureen O’Hara in the Quiet Man and was funny enough to write for The Daily Show. The heroine of my next book, Flirting in Cars, is a journalist and I used Ms. Dowd as a partial model.

And then came the bitch slap – Ms. Dowd’s Op Ed piece, “Heels Over Hemingway.” If you missed it last Friday, Feb 9 in the New York Times, you can check it out online if you’re a member. If not, here’s the gist:

Walking into a big bookstore, looking for Nostromo, Dowd is appalled to find that “chick lit was no longer a niche. It had staged a coup of the literature shelves. Hot babes had shimmied into the grizzled old boys’ club, the land of Conrad, Faulkner and Maugham.”

Dowd goes on to complain that she found a copy of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” with a pink cover.

Now, I was perplexed. Was Dowd annoyed with bookstores, because romantic comedy  and satire, a.k.a. chick lit, gets shelved alongside works of classic literature? Or was she irritated by the fact that most of the contemporary books she sees on the shelves are not destined to be classics? Wait, no, maybe she was unsettled by book publishers, who have slapped sexy new covers on Grande Dame Lit.

Then I read on, and understood: It’s all the woman reader’s fault. According to Ms. Dowd’s friend, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, “America’s reading women could do a lot worse than to put down “Will Francine Get her Guy?” and pick up “The Red Badge of Courage.” Especially since we’re at war and all.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I know America’s Reading Women. Is it a chick-lit only reading group? A cabal? A coven? Is it me? And if so, do I really have to stop reading all insular books about relationships in favor of hefty war tomes by men? What about “Shipping News” by Annie Proulx, or “On Beauty” by Zadie Smith – do those get dispensations? Maybe I’m allowed to read Suzanne Brockmann, because she writes about Seals.

Then Dowd mentioned the “feminization” of literature, and I thought, hey, this isn’t Frank Rich here, this is Intellectual Hot Babe Maureen Dowd, she of the scarlet hair and matching lips. Hell, her own book* had a pulpy, tart-noir cover. Then Jennifer Crusie  explained it all to me. “She’s doing it to generate letters, so she looks popular.”

And I thought, That’s not a bad idea. I could pick on a subgenre and attack it, and then post it on my website, and get lots of passionate responses. But what to focus on – cozy mysteries? Detective novels set in Florida? Food writers’ memoirs?

I’ll let you guys decide. Please send in a genre for me to attack, along with one reason why it should be reviled.

p.s. I don’t believe she was really looking for Nostromo, do you? But if she’s still looking, I have a copy. Right next to Liz Maverick’s Crimson Rogue. (Swear to God, this is true.)

*(A a collection of essays, mildly amusing, but not about to shove Mark Twain off his…hey, what the heck is that doing on the table next to Roughing It?)

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COUNTRY VS. CITY FOR THE HOLDIAYS (December 2006)

Lights, lights, many, many lights.

This, at age two or so, was my very first sentence. Clearly, I am hard-wired for urban living.

I don’t know how it is where you are, but here in the Hudson River Valley it gets dark around 5 pm, which is when most people seem to retire for the night. Whoever invented Daylight Savings Time didn’t understand that it’s more depressing to have the day end abruptly than it is to have it start slowly.

It’s gotten so bad I’ve started watching Sex and the City reruns without the sex. I have a vague feeling that something is missing now that the show’s been edited for basic cable, but really I’m just tuning in for all the soft-porn glossy images of Manhattan.

Which is ironic, since all my city friends are thumbing through their L.L.Bean Catalogues and fantasizing about spending the holidays in rustic splendor, complete with fetching wool sweater, blazing fireplace, cross country skis and golden retriever. And yeah, it is awfully pretty around here, what with all the gently rolling hills and old red barns and grazing sheep and horses.

But the hills are filled with tiny lyme-disease bearing ticks, which are now in the throes of a final mardis gras surge of activity before the winter frost.. The ticks are so ubiquitous that nearly everyone I know has had lyme disease, and it’s not unusual to see a woman with an IV strapped to her arm to keep the antibiotics flowing. I remember as a teenager hearing that in the 1700s, an alarmingly high proportion of the population was walking around with syphilis, and being horrified.

Lyme disease is an awful lot like syphilis, the main difference being that you have less fun acquiring it. The ticks all come from the deer, which are suicidal with lust and keep flinging themselves in front of my car.

And, last but not least, there is the frequent sound of high-caliber firearms discharging near my backyard. Not that I’m against hunting – I’ve changed my mind about this since learning how bad the deer and tick situation is. I am, however, against the city guys who come up here with a few six-packs and start blasting away at anything that moves. My big Chinook dog, Magnus, is deer-colored, and I’ve started dressing him in an orange bandana to make him look less like venison. I’m contemplating adding a hat and scarf.

I tried to take Magnus back to the city for a nice, safe weekend of window shopping, but two cops called me over to inform me that I was a walking thief magnet, with bags hanging off me and a vacant expression on my face as I ambled through the holiday crowds.

“This ain’t no small town, Lady,” they said. “You better get with it.”

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ADVICE FOR WRITERS(November 2005)

Hubris and Humility

Every writer I have ever met has two invisible friends, Hubris and Humility, who take turns whispering in said writer’s ear. Hubris tells you that despite all the billions of books that exist, you have a specific way of looking at the world that is of interest to people, most of whom are not related to you, or friends with your mother. Humility tells you that, after rereading that page you wrote last night, you should probably wait before showing anything to anyone except for your mother. And maybe not even her.

Both these pals are useful. You should just make sure that you are listening to the correct voice at the appropriate time. For example, when you are actually sitting down and writing, listen to Hubris. Hubris will let you get some work done. When you are waiting to hear from an agent or an editor, or when you have just gotten through a terrible critique session where everyone in your writing group called you “derivative”, listen to Hubris. And never, ever read any negative review of your work, particularly ones that begin with the word “Disappointingly,” without ending up with a good, bracing dose of Hubris.

When speaking to fans, agents, editors, reviewers and, above all, when schmoozing with other writers, listen to Humility.

Finding Your Voice

When I was a comic book editor, I used to have a lot of aspiring artists handing me pencil drawings in the style of bigger, more established artists. Some would use very fine pencil strokes, lots of them. Some would use heavy shadows. Some would make every woman look as if she had armadillos projecting from her chest. Nice style, I would say, but when you are starting out, you need to master the basics first.

In comics, this means clear, realistic, visual storytelling. And it works for prose, as well. So don’t try to find your voice. Find your story, and tell it as simply and realistically as you can. If you are writing a fantasy, that may mean describing realistic unicorns. If you are working on a historical set in the middle ages, that means finding your own method for capturing the flavor of Medieval speech in a way that is easily understandable to a modern audience. Don’t strive for a particular effect. Don’t try to make your words pretty. Or, to put it another way, don’t worry about sounding like you. You will sound most like yourself when you just write the story.

How to Write Funny

Humor, real humor, is always a little subversive. This is why puns are not funny. Sorry Shakespeare, sorry British people, but they’re not. Richard Pryor is funny. John Stewart is funny. Helen Fielding’s Diary of Bridget Jones is hysterically, wonderfully funny. Laughter is a startle reaction. If you see it coming, it’s not funny.

Which means that in order to be funny, you have to be a little raw, a little revealing, a little risky. If you are satirizing something, and classic chick lit is basically satire mixed with romance, then you need to be the kid who says, Hey, the emperor has no clothes, and not the guy next to the kid, saying, He’s right.

The big test is this: Is your humorous sentence or observation safe? Could you read it to the PTA? Would your mother in law approve of it? The writer Fay Weldon once advised me to write something that would offend everyone I knew. I don’t think I’ve managed that yet, but it’s a good reminder for anyone who wants to write satire.

How to Write Sexy

What makes sex sexy in real life – trust, privacy, a firm mattress, at least an hour of free time – is just boring in fiction. To keep fictional sex interesting, think of it as serving the same purpose in a novel that a fight scene serves in a superhero comic book. In comics, you want each fight scene to highlight a different use of the hero’s power. So Batman shouldn’t clobber the hero the same way each time, he should use his ingenuity and skill and experience to solve the problem differently this time than he did the time before. And at the end of each fight, there should be a shift in power, meaning that the person who walked into the fight looking like the likely victor should wind up defeated or humbled. In my books, that means I aim to have the hero and heroine connect differently in each love scene, and I strive to have the balance of power shift from the beginning to the end of the scene. I also think of sex scenes as turning points for my characters, and structure them accordingly.

Other than that, the trick to writing sexy is the same as the trick for writing humor. You can’t play it safe and write sexy sex.

Physical Description

Lots of books tell you not to hack up a big bolus of exposition, but nobody says much about physical description.

Personally, I like physical detail. I have a pet peeve with literary authors who never let me know what the protagonist looks like. I want to tell those authors to read some detective fiction, because detective novels always have the best descriptions.

Imitating detective novels, I try to reveal a character’s physical details bit by bit, as he or she goes about the business of living. If I am in the character’s POV or close to it, I try not to describe them in ways they wouldn’t describe themselves, such as, “lustrous honey blonde hair” and “delicately pretty features.” And after a particularly cutting comment by a literary magazine editor in the late eighties, I don’t have my characters catch sight of themselves in a mirror and then give a detailed, top to tail inventory of their physical attributes.

And Last but not Least

The biggest single lesson every writer needs to learn, and then relearn, is when to listen to advice and criticism and when to ignore it. No one can teach this to you. It’s like learning when to follow a new fashion and when to accept that even if everyone around you wears kilts, you know what they do to your calves.

Whether you have never been published or have published dozens of books, whether the person critiquing or advising you is a powerful editor or the author you most admire in the world, you have to ask yourself, Do I suspect that this is true, or does this just feel like the other person doesn’t get what my story is really about?

If your inner voice says the latter, then ignore the advice. Even if it’s mine.

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HARD WORK (Summer 2005)

I’m not supposed to say it was hard. Saying that writing the book was hard is like admitting that you took two hours to get ready for a date. You’ve spent all that effort trying to make yourself look like a natural beauty, and now you’ve blown it.

Well, to hell with it. I’m out of the closet – this last book was damn hard to write. And you know what? Even the books that weren’t this hard to write were damn hard. I think that after about six months or so, post-birth amnesia sets in, and I forget the grinding pain and the mounting panic that something is going terribly wrong, and I think, Look, a perfectly healthy book. That wasn’t so hard.

Except it was.

Trying to get dialogue to appear natural, sound clever and at the same time, actually reveal things? As easy as getting the look of just-out-of bed, sexily tousled hair. Figuring out how your own book ends? As simple as waxing your own legs.

There is a reason so few people actually wax their own legs or finish their novels. It’s messy, it’s painful and it’s stressful, even when you are doing it right.

And yet, rereading it a month after putting the final period on the final sentence, I’m shocked to see that everything reads quite effortlessly. No sign of blood and sweat at all.

And now that I’ve gotten a glimpse at the cover, which I really like, I can almost make myself to believe that the process of writing wasn’t really that bad, in fact, maybe there was only that one bad patch, when the snow was really piling up and I couldn’t get out of the house, even to sit in a café for a few minutes.

But I won’t lie to myself, either. It was hard. But right about now, it begins to feel worth it.

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How do you like living in Manhattan?
	Love it.

Do your characters always live in Manhattan and why?

Manhattan's kind of inexhaustible, because it contains so many different cities: The sexy city of Mahnolo Blahniks and Cosmopolitans, the kinky city with transgendered prostitutes and bondage clubs; and then there's the Manhattan with ten different flavors of psychologist per city block and the one with grimly amused cops from above one hundred and sixty eighth street. And they all brush up against each other, which makes for a lot of different story possibilities. Plus, I have two young kids and I don't get to travel much.

How do you research your books?

Well, since I have school age children, I tend to do my research while the kids are at school. How much research I do depends on the book. For The Dominant Blonde, I made a few calls and interviewed some search and rescue divers, and reread my old diving manuals (I used to dive, and was certified in advanced, deep and night diving.) For Does She or Doesn't She, which was all about fantasy, I pretty much just made everything up. On the Couch was the first time I did a considerable amount of research before I began writing, mainly because it was so much fun hanging out with cops instead of sitting at home, typing away. I've discovered you have to be careful what you research on the internet, though, because ever since looking up some of the kinky stuff for this new book, I get a lot of strange emails with subject lines like Make Your Girl Happy Tonite and frogspawn special cream results guaranteed!

Do you write comic books as well as novels?

I do. And even though it's suddenly become cool for serious writers like Michael Chabon to write comics, I am proud to report that I did it before it was cool, and will probably continue long after all coolness is past. I used to work as a comic book editor (at Vertigo, the mature imprint of DC comics) and I've written two coffee table books about comics as well as one graphic novel (a dark fantasy/romance set in four different time periods) and some single-issue stories. It's funny, I think a lot of comics readers look at romance and chick-lit and assume they wouldn't enjoy it, and vice versa. But I'd bet money that anyone who loves Laura Kinsale and Judith Ivory's intelligent, richly layered stories would fall for Alan Moore's classic run on Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman's award-winning Sandman series. And then there's Terry Moore, who does great chick-lit from the male point of view in his Strangers in Paradise series.

Got a Question for Alisa? Ask Her!

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See more booksigning photos here.	Alisa in action at left : Hoping none of the tasty little sandwiches are stuck in her teeth, Alisa signs at the Tudor Bookstore's Women Writer's Tea at Patsel's Restaurant in Clarks Summit, PA on June 7, 2003. Alisa on the town below : Black tie in Manhattan for the annual Avon authors' dinner, July 2003. Every woman should own a tiara, don't you think?

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