I was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1978 to Thomas and Barbara Manley. It wasn’t easy on my mother. It took three doctors, one C-section and lots of morphine. The doctors names were John, Clark and Anthony. Soon after being born I peed in Dr. John’s face. To make it up to him, my parents decided to call me John. Clark and Anthony became my middle names. I’ve always felt relief I didn’t pee in Clark’s face (as I’m not fond of the name), and rather regretted I didn’t aim for Anthony.
My ancestry dates back to the first European settlers in sixteenth-century Canada, carrying a blend of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and French genes (with a little First Nation from my great grandmother). I was raised Catholic, disliked school, and have been writing speculative fiction since I was nine years old.
Graduating a year early from high school, I moved to a Hindu monastery in the mountains of Southern California where I studied Eastern philosophy, practised yoga meditation and was almost eaten alive by a mountain lion.
Three years later, I moved to Italy where I trained as a fine artist at an academy in Florence. Two years later, I found himself back in Canada, where I struggled as a portrait artist in downtown Toronto.
In 2001, I married, moved out of the big city into a small town, and began work as a freelance ghostwriter and copywriter; while penning short stories and collecting rejection slips from publishers.
In 2018, I began writing my first full-length novel, an urban fantasy set in Stratford, Ontario; but when the first lockdown began in 2020, I put down that project to pen a short dystopian story about where I saw these so-called “public health” measures going. That short story grew into the full-length novel, Much Ado About Corona.
I’m currently working on the sequel, Brave New Normal, while living (and protesting) in Stratford Ontario, with my wife Nicole, and son Jonah.
