Since Ewan McGregor took the Long Way Round in 2004, the literary genre of "Guy on dual-sport motorcycle rides a very long distance," has really exploded. Not necessarily in a good way, either, sort of like when the idiot in your high school stole sodium from the science lab and threw it in the boy's room toilet.

But Paul Clipper's addition to this road-weary subject, the e-book One Time Around: One Big Loop Around a Great Big Country, is different. For one thing, Clipper isn't an accountant with a mid-life itch and a yearning for immortality through self-publishing. He is one of the great unsung motorcycling writers of the last 30 years. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Clipper worked alongside Dirt Bike Magazine's well-known (in off-roading circles) front man, Rick "Super Hunky" Sieman. Their off-beat columns and irreverent reviews, as well as their hands-on approach to tech, made every other motorcycle magazine on the newsstand seem oh-so painfully dull.

Clipper went on to work for KTM and then later bought a somewhat obscure New England-based dirt bike magazine called Trail Rider. Clipper lit a fire under TR and wisely brought in Sieman and another great dirt biking scribe, Ed Hertfelder, as columnists. For all its potential, and despite once getting picked up by a large publisher of enthusiast magazines, Trail Rider had a 20-plus-year heyday, but never moved past the regional level.

Clipper sold Trail Rider in 2010, and then did what he does best, prepped a motorcycle, in this case a used Suzuki V-Strom 650, went riding and then wrote a story about it.

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