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 after that, I found myself back in Canada, where I struggled as a portrait artist in downtown Toronto.
In 2001, I married my first wife, Nicole, moved out of the big city and into a small town. I began work as a freelance ghostwriter and copywriter, while penning short stories, collecting rejection slips from publishers and raising our son Jonah.
In 2018, I began writing my first full-length novel, an urban fantasy set in Stratford, Ontario. But when the lockdowns began in 2020, I set that project aside 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 , which I self-published in 2023.
In 2024, I published my second novel, All the Humans Are Sleeping — another dystopian tale about a farmer, a robot and the end of the world.
I’m currently working on a prequel to Much Ado About Corona, while living in the Netherlands with my son Jonah, second wife Ina Backbier, and my two step-sons. My first wife, Nicole, passed away on September 20, 2022 (you can read more about her life and death on the Sunflower Page).
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