Hi, I’m Elmont.

Nice to meet you.

I write speculative fiction, mostly sci-fi. I started writing at a young age with short stories. I’ve always had an active imagination. I am day-dreamer, it’s hard to grow out of that. Somewhere along the way, I thought that money was more important than following my dreams. Or maybe my dreams became about money. I had a variety of jobs, IT, application development, sales, account management and analytics. For a period in the day-job world, I was an online journalist in a popular consumer interest category. It was fun but part-time and didn’t pay much. Family life became the focus and my interest in championing consumerism faded away. Throughout this, I was continually haunted by story and narrative. Those day dreams became haunting vignettes of something the imaginary characters would say or do. A little more than 10 years ago, I started writing these things down, trying to coalesce them into forms I could share. It wasn’t serious, just a way to tap down on the persistent ideas that would bubble up.

Last year, I had a dear friend, colleague and mentor get let go from his job. I thought he was exceptional in his role, so it was a shock. It was a wake up call. My career wasn’t going to save me, it wasn’t even fulfilling. It wasn’t going extremely well either. I do good work. I get commendations and accolades. I’m dependable. Corporate life, however, is not really that dependable these days. I had to do something, be something more, even if only for myself.

I remembered by dreams. To write, to turn the noise inside my head into something I can share. After 10 years of half-assed writing, I had one half finished draft for a novel, a short-story and a short-film script sitting on the shelf. On night, early June 2025, I decided, let’s just write something new, start to finish. That’s how Forty-Nine began. That’s how we ended up here together.

Forty-Nine began with a kernel of an idea, what if aliens are not the enemy and what if they looked like us? I find these ideas disruptive for two reasons. One, we have a lot of Hollywood content telling us that aliens are the enemy. Secondly, if visitors from somewhere else looked like humans, it creates tension on many fronts: scientific, ontological, theological and even political. To wrap it all up, I wanted to explore what this would look like from the perspective of a young married couple just really getting their life off the ground.

That’s all for now!