Slate Sterling — Action & Sci-Fi Author

Time-Twisting Thrillers

recent posts

about

I’m Slate Sterling, a longtime fan of time-travel stories and a writer living in the Appalachian Mountains. I work as a software engineer and am a military veteran. For me, I write because I love it: the characters, the dialogue, and the thrill of watching a story unfold one step at a time.

  • Timebreaker is now out on Kindle

    Free for all Kindle Unlimited subscribers!

    Hunted by the government and shadowy figures who want him dead, Nelson Ashford is a man outside of time. His search for a better life is shattered when a dying stranger bestows upon him an incredible power. The source of his abilities is a mysterious headband that allows him to freeze the world into a silent tableau, teleport across the country in an instant, and commit the perfect crime.

    But each action comes with a price. While Nelson transforms himself into the audacious Timebreaker, leading a high-stakes life of heists and escapes, he finds himself caught in a two-front war. On one side is tenacious FBI Special Agent Alicia Vaughn, a brilliant investigator determined to solve an impossible case and stop the man who seems to defy physics. On the other is an unknown enemy, assassins who stop at nothing to hunt him down.

    Timebreaker plunges the reader directly into two minds grappling with impossible abilities and human flaws. With realistic worldbuilding and a plot that accelerates with every chapter, Timebreaker is the first installment in a new series that blends action with science fiction. This is a tale that will span… well, no spoilers.

  • Teaser Prologue

    In the twilight of the third millennium, humanity’s final embers glowed beneath a world of ash. Deep in a subterranean city shielded from the radioactivity above, the inheritors of science discovered a miracle: an artifact of impossible origin. It was a simple headband, yet it promised to rewrite the very laws of existence, for it held dominion over time itself.

    The power to undo the apocalypse, to reshape reality, became an obsession. But the man who led Project Harbinger, entitled the Founder, saw not salvation but a new, more terrible damnation in their ambition. Fearing the tyranny they would build, he made a desperate choice.

    In an ultimate act of defiance, a total betrayal, he used the artifact, a device they were only beginning to understand, to cast himself on a one-way pilgrimage as far as possible into the deep past, vanishing from their world forever. As his final, dying sacrifice, he gifted the headband to the first person he stumbled upon, his final hope the wearer would not become a monster.

    Those left behind had only a hollow throne. The artifact was gone, lost to an forgotten nine centuries before their time. Physical travel was now impossible; the path the Founder took had crumbled behind him. Yet they did not abandon their aspirations. No matter how hopeless their situation appeared.

    From the faint temporal resonance the artifact bled across the ages, they learned to listen. And from listening, they learned to reach. It was not a physical grasp, but a whisper of thought, an echo of will sent across the chasm of time. They could not retrieve their prize, but they could attempt to target its new keeper, a man they could barely understand. They could output tremendous energy through machines built by the greatest minds, transforming susceptible victims into assassins and strangers into monsters. All in the desperate hope that the artifact might one day be left unguarded, and that they would find a way to retrieve it. The vaguest, most complex, furthest reaching hunt the world had ever seen had begun.

    But the cost of such attempts was immensely high, unbelievably difficult, and the headband quickly realized it was under attack and prepared defenses of its own. Did it trust whose head it guarded? Would the wearer have its full potential, a way to become the man he’d always dreamed of becoming?

    Now, as the 21st century dawned, ignorant and pristine, the world was preparing to change forever.

  • Welcome!

    Thanks for stopping by. I’m Slate Sterling, a lifelong time-travel aficionado who has enjoyed almost every story that bends the clock. Now, years later, I finally sat down to write my own adventures, and that decision brought me here.

    The name is a pen name, but the rest is real. I live in the Appalachian Mountains, work as a software engineer, and I’m a military veteran. Over the years I’ve published a handful of action and sci-fi short stories on various websites, each one a test flight.

    My debut novel to be is currently entitled Timebreaker. The manuscript sits at about ninety thousand words and needs only a light final polish and a cover before launch later this year. It will open a planned trilogy, and rough drafts for Books Two and Three are already tucked away waiting for their own rewrites. For me, this isn’t a way to make money, or a way to establish… self-pride. I simply love writing. I love the characters. The way they talk, the way they feel.

    I want the reader to feel every heartbeat of the characters, to hear dialogue that sounds like real people talking, and to flip pages because you must know what comes next. Mysteries unraveling as time goes by, step by step. The trilogy digs into gray morality. I love ordinary folks, folks pressed against powerful, shady forces, and the ripple effect of every choice they make. This will not be the type of book where a character kills someone, even in self defense, and then feels perfectly normal the next chapter. Two first-person narrators share the pages, giving you an inside seat to each state of mind.

    Social media links and a newsletter are in the works. I’ll share an excerpt and more updates the moment everything is wired together. In the meantime, thanks again for dropping in. I’m excited to have you along for the journey.