Volunteer

Here we start a new adventure, and this one has a bit of truth to it as well.  My final profession before I moved from New Jersey was a chef at a hospital.  The story itself started out much shorter than it will wind up (pretty much just a vehicle to introduce a couple new characters) but then I got the job at the hospital and started mining that for little nuggets of funny that I could add here.  This story takes many instances of my time there, as well as some of the people I met along the way, and introduces them to the Eat @ Shrimpy's universe.  Much of what you will read during this arc is true with a twist, and I'll point out when the conversations or people are real.  I wrote most of this story while I was down in New Jersey so I was able to capture the conversations when they happened.  In fact, this is the last story that I wrote while I was down in New Jersey, and actually the last story I wrote for almost six years until I started to work on the strip again.  It's an oldie but a goodie.  

This concludes my "Jersey Years" group of stories (Minding the Store, Survive-It, Waffle-Flavored Revenge, Robbin' the Cradle, They Call it Puppy Love - follow the link for the first strip in each story) where I took a small group of strips, many only six or twelve strips in length originally created for an assignment in college, and expanded them to fill out a full storyline.  After this story I pretty much started writing with a specific number of strips and a relatively coherent path in mind from the beginning.  While I think these last six stories stand up pretty well, they only get better from here and by the next story "One Flew" you'll be able to see that.  This last year has been great and it was definitely a feeling out process with the characters and finding their unique voices, but the best is yet to come.