A Prescription for Love

A Prescription for Love is a story written by shukyou and illustrated by Iron Eater. It ran in Issue 42 and can be found at http://s2b2.livejournal.com/245760.html and http://www.shousetsubangbang.com/mirror/a-prescription-for-love/.

Summary

Two actors on a medical soap opera fall for one another.

Jack Johnson, M.D., lowers the personnel file and narrows his eyes. He doesn't like the man standing before him, the new face in the familiar hospital family. He's young and handsome, what Jack was maybe fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. The young man sticks out his hand and introduces himself with a Mexican accent, thick enough to be exotic but not thick enough that Middle America can't understand him: "Mariano Julio Vasquez, pleased to meet you."

From fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org: "A couple of hospital soap stars hook up and fall in love; and nested inside that, there's a story about their soap characters which is cheesy and fun."

Connections

A Prescription for Love is unconnected to other stories or universes.

Related Links

This story has been featured at GoodReads.

Author's Notes

As with most SSBBery, this story started with a joke, and that joke was: Dr. Cox/JD, a la Scrubs. It obvioulsy went way off the rails, but well, that's about par for the course.

I was going to make it all take place on the set of a telenovela, but this past month has just been brutal for me in terms of ... well, in terms of everything, and I realized real early that I wouldn't have the time to do the research to pull that off with anything approaching plausibility. Thus, I decided to go with a telenovela star and see what transpired from there. I'm sure a lot of the medical stuff in the hospital sections isn't accurate at all, but since it's part of a bad soap opera, I don't really care.

And it is a bad soap. In fact, my one real regret with how pressed for time I was with this is that I couldn't go back and make it an even worse soap, if for no other reason than how it would make Terry's complaints seem less like whining and more justified. But yeah, it's not good. Even by soap opera standards, even by soap opera in the seventies standards, it's not good.

But you'd totally watch it. You know you would.

I didn't actually calculate correct dates or episode numbers, so if you find an error in those, well ... yeah, you shouldn't look at those too closely. And I did a minimal amount of geography-checking to make sure this story wasn't completely unlike Los Angeles, but there are probably giant, glaring errors there, too. If you could refrain from pointing them out, that would be super of you. Basically, it's a total mess! But it's finished, and it wound up being way better than I was expecting it to be, so it's definitely got that going for it.

And finally, major props to Iron Eater for pulling off not one but two delightful last-minute illustrations! Originally I didn't bother anyone for artist services, because I thought the story might not get finished, and when it was clear that it was going to make it, I asked if anyone had some free time. Turns out the answer was yes! Man, that title card makes me laugh every time.

(from http://ladysisyphus.livejournal.com/841146.html)