Lovesick by Marina Ford
Dreamspinner Press

Cover Artist: Alexandria Corza

Available for Purchase at

Also at Dreamspinner Press in Paperback

Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words is happy to host Marina Ford here today. Welcome, Marina!

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Hi, I’m Marina, and I want to introduce you to my debut novel “Lovesick.” It’s the story of a university lecturer, Leo, who is based in London, and who spent the last couple of years mooning after a colleague of his, who disappoints all of Leo’s hopes by getting engaged. The story of how Leo recovers from this blow, how he finds love and friendship, and how he becomes a better person in the process, is told in the form of a diary.

It’s the only book I’ve ever written in this form, and it was an interesting challenge. Normally, chapters give you, the writer, a framework for how to organise your plot points. But diary entries are not like chapters. Stories, friendships, issues don’t evolve, usually, within the span of a day. While most novels (written either in the first person or third person perspective) involve a certain level of foreknowledge by the narrator, and therefore allow you to bring up things that will later become important, diaries have to seem like they are written a day at a time, and so if you, as the writer, want something mentioned that may later become important but feels innocuous or meaningless to begin with, you have to think of clever ways of including them.

The decision to convey Leo’s story in the form of a diary was mostly dictated by the type of story I wanted to tell. Since Leo’s perspective, and especially his flaws which this perspective exposes, are part of his arc, it made sense to tell his story in a way that revealed Leo to the reader, that might not be obvious to Leo himself. The diary form allowed me to present a ‘slice-of-life’ novel in a way that didn’t feel like I was cluttering the reader’s mind with irrelevant detail. The things Leo notices in his day-to-day life, which he thinks are worthy of being mentioned in his diary, tell us often more about Leo than they do about anything else. His wry observations about his neighbours, his work, his family and his friends serve not just to make us aware of the world around him, but mostly to unravel the way Leo sees the world – and eventually it allows us to monitor his growth and progress as a human being.

I had great fun writing this book. It was a labour of love from start to finish. I hope this comes through while reading it. It’s meant to be funny, light and romantic. I hope it’s as enjoyable to read as it was to write. 

Author bio:

Marina Ford is a thirty-year-old book addict, who would, if permitted, spend all of her time in bookstores, libraries, or in her own bed with stacks and stacks of books. Luckily, she has a husband and a dog who force her to interact with humans of planet Earth from time to time. In fact, she so enjoyed falling in love with her husband that she can’t resist evoking those same feelings in the love stories she creates in her head. She does not believe in love at first sight— but she does believe in Happy Ever After, though it must be earned. She likes her stories to be light and frothy, since real life can be miserable enough without making up more of it in fiction. She lives in England, loves rain (gives one an excuse to stay at home and read books, right?), long walks (when it doesn’t rain), history, love stories, classical literature, pulpy literature, Jane Austen, languages, and dogs. It is her dream to one day possess an enormous country house in which each room is a library (okay, maybe except for the kitchen), and in which there are more dogs than people. A smaller and perhaps more realistic dream of hers is to make people smile with the things she writes.