A.R. Marquez is a designer, novelist, and music video producer based in Los Angeles. His creative practice spans brand identity, AI-generated visual storytelling, and cinematic content production — more than a decade spent at the intersection of technology, music, and visual culture. That background is legible on every page of One Ascent Time, his debut novel: the eye for signage and shop interiors, the ear for how a room changes when amplification enters it, the instinct that a city is a system running two processes at once.

One Ascent Time takes place on a single Friday — October 5th, 2007, the year the world went wireless — and follows twelve characters converging on one instrument. A freelance designer named Nash E. Raya buys a hand-carved, kintsugi-repaired guitar for the wrong price on Ventura Boulevard. Sixty miles west, a collector who commissioned that instrument thirty years earlier watches the Pacific and waits. Below the break, three sisters hear their mother's voice at low volume for the first time in their lives.

It is the first book of The Signal Cycle, a planned six-novel sequence pairing six cities with six instruments: Los Angeles and the guitar, London and the lute, Paris and the accordion, Tokyo and the shamisen, Seoul and the gayageum, Sydney and the concertina. A companion audiobook framework has eight characters narrating the same Friday from their own future vantage points, in eight distinct voices, and a vertical video series is in development.

Marquez lives and works in Los Angeles.