Kip Manley is creating Serial Fiction
Reattaching wonder-generating mechanisms of fantasy to the City of Portland.
10
$71
Milestone Goals
2 Milestone Goals
reached
Parks & Recreation
Redesign! Nothing drastic, but the look-and-feel could use a little buff and polish: the website, new editions of the paperback collections, the zines.
Auditor's Office
Audiobooks! And I'll need to add some new goals, I suppose.
About
Kip Manley lives in the City of Roses with a cartoonist, an auxiliary member of the Justice League and the Crystal Gems, and the requisite two cats.
Location
Portland, OR, USA
Top PatronsSee all 10
My name is Kip Manley; I'm a writer living here in Portland, Oregon, where I labor away at a slyly romantic urban phantastick, a gonzo noirish epic doled out in coffee-break sized installments.
City of Roses is—well, I've tried summing it up over the years, fielding taglines that reach for the intriguingly oblique (“The ten thousand things, the one true only”) and the wryly self-deprecating (“The city of Portland, only with more sword fights”). —It's about what happens when Jo Maguire, a highly strung, underemployed telemarketer, meets Ysabel, a princess of unspecified pedigree—but it's also about ghost bicycles, retired river-gods, boar-hunts in shopping malls, secret struggles over cities that might never were—but it's also about Violence, and Power, and Romance, about genrejumps and genderfuck and hearts broken cleanly and otherwise, and that moment when the bass and all the drums except maybe a handclap drop out of the bridge and you're left hanging from an aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back—and also, yes, the occasional bit of swordplay.
”Kip Manley's City of Roses is the most fun I've had with a book in a good while.“ —Felix Gilman
The first season of City of Roses, Autumn into Winter, has been completed, and is available for free online, in chapbook form, or collected in ebooks and paperbacks available at the usual outlets. It's done, but it took ten years or more to do—I'd rather like to pick up the pace for seasons two (Spring; Summer), three (Summer), and four (Winter, and then Spring). A regular stream of Patreon money will help to clear the time and mental space I'll need to do that; the goals and milestones to the side there are a stab at what that might look like, and take.
City of Roses is—well, I've tried summing it up over the years, fielding taglines that reach for the intriguingly oblique (“The ten thousand things, the one true only”) and the wryly self-deprecating (“The city of Portland, only with more sword fights”). —It's about what happens when Jo Maguire, a highly strung, underemployed telemarketer, meets Ysabel, a princess of unspecified pedigree—but it's also about ghost bicycles, retired river-gods, boar-hunts in shopping malls, secret struggles over cities that might never were—but it's also about Violence, and Power, and Romance, about genrejumps and genderfuck and hearts broken cleanly and otherwise, and that moment when the bass and all the drums except maybe a handclap drop out of the bridge and you're left hanging from an aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back—and also, yes, the occasional bit of swordplay.
What others have said.
“City of Roses by Kip Manley is the closest I came to a really well-crafted, character-driven fantasy… its mix of young, bohemian characters and mythic fantasy tropes reminded me strongly of Charles de Lint. Manley's prose style is a couple of cuts above the increasingly tedious first-person narrations of urban fantasy.“ —the Guardian
“Kip Manley is worth reading. He says interesting things, and he actually knows how to write.” —Teresa Nielsen Hayden
“As I read "Wake up…", I found my cynicism undone over and over again. ‘Oh,’ my inner cynic said, ‘look, here's Celtic-tinged music. Here's the love triangle, with genders switched up and mixed. Here's the smart-ass protagonist getting in trouble because she's too willing to throw a verbal punch.’ But then Manley would whip those familiar elements into a moment rooted in idealism and hope, but with a healthy dose of life's tragedies, the entire, swirling, beautiful mess tumbling my inner cynic on her ass.” —Bookslut
”Kip Manley's City of Roses is the most fun I've had with a book in a good while.“ —Felix Gilman
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What I’m asking for.
The first season of City of Roses, Autumn into Winter, has been completed, and is available for free online, in chapbook form, or collected in ebooks and paperbacks available at the usual outlets. It's done, but it took ten years or more to do—I'd rather like to pick up the pace for seasons two (Spring; Summer), three (Summer), and four (Winter, and then Spring). A regular stream of Patreon money will help to clear the time and mental space I'll need to do that; the goals and milestones to the side there are a stab at what that might look like, and take.