A.R. Marquez is a Los Angeles-based designer, novelist, and music video producer. His creative practice spans brand identity, AI-generated visual storytelling, and cinematic content production. He has spent more than a decade working at the intersection of technology, music, and visual culture — a background that informs the specific texture of One Ascent Time, his debut novel. The book is set in the Los Angeles he knows: the Ventura Boulevard corridor, Laurel Canyon, Silver Lake, the 405 at midday, the specific acoustics of a city that has always been doing two things at once. He is currently at work on the companion novel.

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.

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.

Dear [Agent],

I'm querying you because of your work with [Comparable Author] and your stated interest in literary fiction that carries genre inside it — ONE ASCENT TIME lives exactly there.

Los Angeles, October 5, 2007. On a single Friday, a freelance designer named Nash E. Raya acquires a centuries-old guitar from a Ventura Boulevard shop — underpriced by a clerical accident, warm to the touch, and carrying the imprisoned consciousness of a woman named Sera. Thirty years earlier, on a Malibu beach, a man named Rourke commissioned the instrument to hold her: not out of cruelty, but out of love that had curdled into ownership. When Nash plays the guitar through a newly installed pickup, Sera's three daughters hear their mother sixty miles away in a Pacific cavern, and start inland. By nightfall, twelve people converge on a Silver Lake show, and the chord travels through the city's water infrastructure — pipe by pipe, reservoir to tidal exchange to ocean — until it arrives at Rourke's cliff as a shift in the tide.

ONE ASCENT TIME is literary urban fantasy, complete at 38,305 words. It sits alongside UNDER THE SILVER LAKE (the Los Angeles conspiracy as literary object), Michael Chabon's genre-inflected literary fiction, and Emily St. John Mandel's ensemble convergence narratives. Its mythology is rooted in mermaid lore, acoustic physics, and the specific moment in 2007 when analog culture was becoming something else entirely.

It is the first book of The Signal Cycle, a planned six-novel sequence pairing six cities with six instruments. A companion audiobook framework is developed, in which eight characters narrate the same Friday from their own future vantage points, and a vertical video series is in development.

I am a Los Angeles-based designer and music video producer. The complete manuscript is available upon request. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Angel R. Marquez (writing as A.R. Marquez)

1. One Ascent Time takes place on one Friday in October 2007. Why that week, and why that year?
2. The guitar is a prison before it is an instrument. Where did that idea start?
3. Rourke isn't a villain in the usual sense. How do you write love that has curdled into ownership?
4. The signal travels through the city's water infrastructure. How much of that plumbing is real?
5. Twelve characters converge in a single day. How do you keep a reader oriented?
6. You're a designer and music video producer. What did that bring to the prose?
7. The audiobook framework has eight narrators speaking from their own futures. How does that change the book?
8. The Signal Cycle pairs six cities with six instruments. How did those pairings arrive?

Literary urban fantasy. 38,305 words. Trim 5.5 × 8.5, perfect bound, approx. 123 pages. Publisher: RockYouPie Records. Format, price, ISBN and on-sale date to be confirmed. Territories: world. Rights enquiries via hello@rockyoupierecords.com.