- Genre
- Literary urban fantasy
- Length
- 38,305 words
- Series
- The Signal Cycle — Book I of VI
- Status
- Complete manuscript
The Novel
One Ascent Time
A novel about resonance, memory, and the hidden architecture beneath ordinary life.
Los Angeles. October 5, 2007. The year the world went wireless.
On a single Friday, a freelance designer named Nash E. Raya acquires a centuries-old guitar from a Ventura Boulevard shop — underpriced, warm to the touch, carrying something inside it that has no name in the language of the people who have handled it. By the time he understands what he's holding, the city has already started moving around him.
Sixty miles west on a Malibu cliff, a collector watches the Pacific and waits. In a cavern below the break, three sisters surface with a mission and a timer on their wrists. In Tennessee, two cousins follow an app toward a frequency they can't name. In Laurel Canyon, a woman opens a book to a back section that describes a method.
ONE ASCENT TIME is a novel about a city that is also a nervous system, a guitar that is also a prison, and a single day that has been thirty years in the making.
DO NOT LOSE THE PIECE — SIMON, GUITAR CENTER
Excerpt
Opening pages
The moon arrived before midnight.
Not appeared. Arrived. The Pacific below took the light and gave it back in pieces, silver and shifting, as a conspiracy gives back only what it chooses.
A quarter mile offshore, past the break, Wade Calloway sat astride his board and thought about none of this. He thought about the beer. He thought about the spliff. He thought about how the ocean at this hour — full moon, late September, the water still holding summer — was the only place in the world that felt correctly sized for a person.
Out here there was only the swell under him, the black water, the silence of open ocean that was not silence at all but a sound so large it registered as quiet — a low hiss, broad and constant, the ocean breathing through its teeth.
He did not notice the ripple at first. It moved sideways across the swell — not with it, not against it, but perpendicular. Not what water does on its own. He watched it complete its arc around him. A circle. He sat up straighter.
The water directly in front of him broke. Not violently. The surface parted as it does when something chooses to surface.
A woman. She rose as women rise in old stories — as if she had always been there and was only now making it official.
Excerpt — Chapter One, “The Water Takes”
Transmission log
Read the next twenty pages
Subscribers get the extended excerpt and the release date first.
Synopsis
The whole story, ending included
Written for agents and editors. This is not back-cover copy — it spoils everything.