Drumroll, Please

Well hello and hello. Emily and Zac here. Well, Zac is really here here. As in I'm writing. So from here on out, when the pronoun "I" is used, that's me, Zachary B Chastain. Ok, glad we got that cleared up.

It's a beautiful day in NY. Emily and I drove to the Cyber Cafe on Main Street to decide the fate of this blog. (Note from Emily: What if they stalk us? My response: Get over yourself.)

Our mission? To create an AlphaHouse-worthy blog. Who are we? Where do we come from? What are our favorite flavors of ice cream? Could God make a rock so heavy even he couldn't lift it? These are the questions we've assembled to answer. Our first task-- to define who we are. Well, we know a few things, at least: 1) We are the AlphaHouse Publishing authors hard at work on a variety of books. 2) We're not satisfied leaving these issues to books published for middle-school readers and want to say and hear more. 3) We want to connect our words and thoughts to YOUR words and thoughts-- you, out there, Oh Ambiguous Internet Blogger/Reader.

So join us.

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Oh Zac, you and your vague, ambitious obscurities about what we're doing here. That didn't really answer anything...

Emily here, in case you haven't figured out that Zac isn't talking anymore. Let's try this again. Who are we? The four of us were hired at the beginning of the summer to write books for AlphaHouse, specifically for three series: All About AIDS, Nutrition: A Global View, and Health and the Environment. These are fairly typical books for AlphaHouse, books aimed at a middle-school to early high school readership, mostly for the purpose of education. (If you really want to know anything more, you should go and visit the website.)

I guess that leads to another question: What is AlphaHouse? Officially, we're a small publishing company in upstate NY that tries to make socially-conscious books about a variety of topics for a variety of audiences. But who are we really? We're writers, editors, graphic designers, publicists, and generally hardworking folks. The office in which most of us work was once home to our boss, Ellyn, and her family. This, and the fact that we're all pretty friendly people, has meant that we're more than co-workers, we're friends as well. The four of us may have all met each other this summer, but it didn't take long for us to expand our relationship beyond work; soon we were going hiking, on day trips to Ithaca, and to movies together.


(The four of us in Ithaca, NY...Nat, Zac, Emily, and Cory)

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So we hope this blog will serve as a place to extend that sense that work and life can and should be integrated in some way. We'd like to take issues that get raised inside the office and bring them outside the office-- not just into our conversations over coffee, but into our cyber existence as well. (Zac again, by the way.)

More to come. There's been far too much talking and not enough picture taking. Stay tuned.