Be Careful Who You Tweet!

On Monday night, facing the prospect of reading before bed, I sent out a genuine question about a book I’m reading. 

Terry Fallis wrote the very funny novels Best Laid Plans and The High Road about a maverick MP named Angus McLintok. Fallis’ story of becoming a novelist is inspirational. He self-published his first book and got picked up by a major publisher.  Both novels are now best-sellers.  But his latest is set in the world of PR and it has none of the zip or humour of the other two so far. It’s plodding along.  I’m currently mired in excruciating detail about Power Point presentations.

I follow Fallis on Twitter so I purposely didn’t include his Twitter handle in my tweet.  It read: Has anyone read Up and Down by Terry Fallis? I’m finding it boring and wondering if I should stick with it? Not like his other books.

So guess who responded?  The author himself:    Terry Fallis ‏@lisabrandt1001 I’d say stick with it. But I’m biased. Hope you like it.

Naturally I felt like a turd. Even though I stand by my assessment of the book so far, I still didn’t want to figuratively walk up to the guy and say, “you’re boring me!” So I said so: @TerryFallis Crap. I feel like a turd.  I LOVED Best Laid Plans and The High Road. I’ll keep reading. 🙂

And the very classy Mr. Fallis replied: @lisabrandt1001 Not at all! No worries. If you like Angus, I think you’ll like Landon.

So now I have to stick with it!  Argh.  So I insulted a writer, and a good one but at least he took it well. And I was only being honest.  It reminds me of John Grisham’s attempts to write anything except legal dramas. Yes he can write but no he can’t make anything but his original genre pop off the page.  Anyway, you never know who’s out there anymore and searching for their own name independent of their Twitter handle!