Every married couple remembers who popped the question and when. Alex Wellen's engagement story is such a doozy, he lifted it frame by frame for his romantic, laugh-out-loud-funny first novel, Lovesick.

He really did drive his girlfriend from San Francisco to a Wine Country B&B, call her dad at the last minute to ask for his blessing and spell out his intentions in Scrabble tiles in the midst of a game. (There are plenty more details, hilarious fumbles, anxious moments and plot triggers in this scene, but to describe them would spoil it for readers.)

Lovesick is the story of a pharmacy technician and irrepressible inventor who falls in love with his boss' daughter in Crockett, the tiny Contra Costa County town where they grew up, and runs into a heap of trouble on the way to the altar.