Imogen Lloyd Webber on Politics, Punditry, and Having Fun

Imogen Lloyd Webber, author of The Twitter Diaries. (Photo: John Swannell)Can women embrace their serious side and also admit to wanting a little fun? "We all need some light in our lives," Imogen Lloyd Webber says. "It's OK to embrace both."

Lloyd Webber's serious side is evidenced by her career: As a commentator for Fox News and MSNBC, she's focused on politics and news issues. But her latest endeavor -- "The Twitter Diaries," a quirky new novel that meshes friendship with social media -- is all fluff and fun. The book is inspired by her own real-life Twitter friendship with Georgia Thompson, a sports journalist who became her co-author on "The Twitter Diaries."

"I wrote the book between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. every morning when I was in the writing stage," she told

It's a quick, conversational read, she explains (you can skim excerpts of it at TheTwitterDiaries.com). The main characters, Tuesday Fields and Stella Cavill, meet at a New Year's Eve party and spend the next 12 months going back and forth on Twitter as their friendship blooms. The book is 12 months of their conversation in tweets, flanked by a prologue and epilogue written in prose.

"It reads like dialog," she explains. "It's really very quick."

The Twitter DiariesThe two wrote the book together, and then made sure that each Tweet in it conformed to the 140-character limit -- without strange abbreviations or text-speak.

"'And' is A-N-D," she says. "No symbols or anything, so our mums who aren't on Twitter could read it and find it accessible."

But if you are on Twitter, there's a fun surprise: Tuesday (@tuesdayfields) and Stella (@stellacavill) are, too. And you can chat with (and follow) them as well.

"You can have so much fun when you're doing something new," Lloyd Webber says. "You can kind of rip up the rule book."

"We had so much fun with these characters, we didn't want to stop," she adds.

Lloyd Webber, who also wrote the (non-fiction) "The Single Girl's Guide," went from author to political pundit after her last book tour. After studying modern political history at Cambridge University in England and spending years in the media, she ended up in the United States, talking about women as a business demographic on Fox News. Things "snowballed" from there, she says.

After several heated appearances on Fox News -- "I'm a Brit, so I'm liberal just from that," she quips -- she got a call from MSNBC, asking her to be a contributor. It was a perfect fit: She's fascinated by U.S. politics.

"This is the most important country in the world. It really is," she tells Yahoo! Shine from her home-base in New York. "This election matters to the whole of the free world… we all have a stake in it world wide. Americans don't have a stake in what happens in the British election, but who the next president of the United States is really matters."

For the record, she thinks it'll be Barack Obama. "It's obviously very hard to get rid of an incumbent," she says. But the economy could give Mitt Romney a chance at the Oval Office. "The worse the economy is, the better Romney's chance to win," she explains. "Obama may really truly lose the election over issues that are completely outside his control."

As for the so-called "War on Women," contraception, and the fact that women's issues are at play in politics these days, Lloyd Webber laughs. "It's incredible that these discussions seem to be foxing on in 2012," she says. "Nobody is going to win this election without women."

Copyright © 2012 Yahoo Inc.




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