So, this just happened...

You hear it all the time. Well, you do if you follow award shows. “It’s an honour to be nominated”. Yeah, okay. It’s also pretty damn nice to win. And I did. Well, me and Clean Sweep did, the 2019 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best New Book by a Manitoba Author! Here’s a slice of the release.

**May 8, 2019, Winnipeg MB: CORRECTION: In 2019, the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award was declared a tie by the jury who selected two recipients for the prestigious award for best first book by a Manitoba author. Due to a record-keeping error, only one recipient, Tasha Spillett, was announced at the event on May 3.  The Manitoba Book Awards / Les Prix du livre du Manitoba is proud to announce that Clean Sweep by Michael J. Clark, published by ECW Press, was also selected as a recipient of the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Author. 

Woohoo! So go get one! And Mahoney’s Camaro drops May 28th! On sale now at McNally Robinson Grant Park Winnipeg!

Make sure they know you're alive

Hey there, web-based traveler!

It's been awhile, so lets bring you up to speed. Clean Sweep is out there, doing its thing. Decent reviews for the most part, not bad for the first throw. Will everyone like it? Nope. Do I care? Double nope. Do I respect any and all comments? Well, you kinda have to. I think the easiest mistake to make in putting any of your scrawls out there is to take it personally. When I wore the hat of 'automobile journalist' (See 'shill'), I had plenty of anonymous hate speech deposited in the boxes. I still remember when I predicted the return of the four-cylinder Chevy Camaro! (That's when I put up the security cameras.) Hell hath no fury like someone who'd never drive a Fury, convinced that their assemblage of parts is a better piece of crap than the one that Calvin is peeing on, in decal form, on their back window. Hate to say it, but its all shit. All of it. I've lost enough blood on them to know. 

That doesn't mean I don't love 'em, every last one of those rust buckets that peed, and sometimes shat on the driveway. When you read Book Two, you'll get it. Mahoney's Camaro isn't a trailer queen. That Royal Plum wonder has dents, dings, and problems that no warranty could ever fix. I'm working on the edits now from Emily Schulz. (emilyschultz.com) She's awesome, read her, love her stuff. Do it. 

Book Three is underway, somewhere in the Nopiming Provincial Park in my beloved Manitoba, around the page known as Ninety-Eight. (Also the name of my favorite land yacht Oldsmobile.). Hope to be done by the summer. Yeah, right...

Back to work!

MJC  

Plugged ears, healing stitches, and 340 pages

I'm not quite sure how most authors treat themselves after completing a book. Am I supposed to treat myself? Perhaps the better thing to do is treat myself, and my creative bones to continuing to write, as in the third book I signed paper on for ECW Press. I'm currently in the phase known as Legible Chicken Scratch. It might end up being a period piece, probably the 1970's at the family cabin. Or a futurescape idea that my lovely bride threw my way. Either way, somethin's coming.

The first draft of Book Two has been completed, and sent to the good people at ECW Press. To be fair to my physical state at the time, I had a little bitty day surgery, (Not Restylane, smart-asses) and I'm still waiting for the Ear Wax Fairy to unplug my left, your right ear. I'm thinking about trying this ear candling thing, which might end up being the premise for my fourth book. 

Back to Book Deuce. The working title is 'Mahoney's Camaro', though I'm thinking 'The Girl in the Camaro' has a better ring. Enter Steve Mahoney, a Winnipeg tow truck driver in the summer that was 1985 in Winnipeg. He tows a car out of the Red River one night, a car that he actually needs to fix his broken one, a 1967 Chevy Camaro. At the time, he's not too worried about the dead occupant in the driver's seat, a woman who had handcuffed herself to the steering wheel. Neither are the cops, considering it to be an open-and-shut case of suicide. That's when the weird starts happening. Mahoney quickly discovers that his new-to-him Camaro has a non-factory option, the ghost of the woman behind the wheel. She has no plans on leaving anytime soon, not until she figures out what happened to her, an answer that lies somewhere in the ether of new drugs, creative accounting, and a car dealer that's as dirty as, well, a car dealer. (It also has a bitchin' 80's soundtrack.)

Thus endeth the update. 

MJC

The two-hundred, the fifty K, the two-thirds, and then, the rest

I'm sitting at page 202-203, if MS Word can be believed, on what I have initially decided to call Mahoney's Camaro. On one hand, yay. On the other hand, oh sweet merciful shit. The building, the characters, the plot. (Plot?) It's held my interest this long, so I can only hope that it will do the same when I soak the physical pages with second-rate Amazon printer ink, and hand it to my wifey for the first look. 

The marketing has begun on the first book. The book launch, confirmed!!! (March 15th, 2018, at McNally Robinson in Winnipeg.) I was given the option of a 50-person space, or a 20-120 modular pad. I went modular, and not just because I like saying the word slowly for fun. I want the place to be splitting at the seams, fist-fights breaking out for copies, and the proverbial cops showing up to haul us all away in paddy wagons. Gonzo book launch! Relax McNally, I'm sure it won't go down like that, but I anticipate a turn-out that will be at capacity. (A polite, well-behaved capacity.)

Facebook has been quite an experience. I'll throw up the odd thing that interests me, blink hard at the political machinations of my friends. (Ray, I'm looking in your direction, a direction that needs to be in a book at some point.) I'll probably get people to come here and check out my ramble, instead of plopping said ramble into a wallpaper surrounded by unicorns and babbling brooks. Seventeen friends! Huzzah! (At least one of them will help me move the body, isn't that right, RAY?)

I'll probably do a video before the year is out to promote Clean Sweep, plop it on the Road Trip YouTube channel. I'm hoping that my twisted views about cupholders and crash protection will ka-ching a few purchases through the Amazonian jungle. (That's where the fulfillment centre is, right?)

Looks like my first interview will be coming up soon, so I'll keep you up to date, post it when its ready. 

The goal is to be done the first draft of the second book by December 14th. The will, and the speed are there. So there it is, a deadline imposed. I'll check back in then to let you know how correct/full-of-BS I was with that statement.

Merry Happy

MJC

 

 

 

Kicking and screaming into the world of new-ish media

Blogging. Buh-logging. I'd rather be logging, with a gas-powered log splitter. (Steer it back to the centre, Mikey.) 

First off, welcome to michaeljclarkbooks.com. That's my name, without the books.com part of course. (You're rambling again. Get to the bloody point.) Oh, and the 'J' is for Jeffery. 

As this is Day One for getting my Squarespace squared away, I thought I'd shake the rust off of my knuckles and explain a little bit about the journey that is Book One. Like most first novels, Clean Sweep has been in the works for an eighth of a decade. I'm better known for writing about cars, talking on the radio about cars, and assembling videos of Yours Truly talking, driving, and pointing at cars. (Head on over to youtube.com/user/RoadTripRides for some time well wasted.) When I bump into car people and tell them my first book is coming out, they smile. Then I tell them its not about cars. That's when their heads do a Louis Del Grande. (On the inside.)

I'm sure I'm going to get asked at some point about the shift in my scribbles. (Shift. Cars again. Bloody Hell!) The fact is that I've been moving in this direction for some time, starting off about 13 years ago with sloppy screenplays that were pitched to all manner of shady Hollywood types. (In light of the current climate, which is raining well-deserved hot lava onto various members of the movie industry, that was probably a good thing.) As for the world that is automobile journalism, it sounds pretty glamorous, and it is. Ford, Toyota, and even little bitty Mitsubishi don't ply you with wine and roast beast in hopes of a bad review.

I was starting to feel more like a corporate shill than an intrepid reporter. I remember trying to do a story on the wave of crashes and fatalities involving certain domestic vehicles with overloaded keychains. (The weight of the extra crap was turning the key to the Off position while in motion, disabling the steering and the airbags.) A database had been set up by many of the grieving parents, showing the date of their loved one's passing. It didn't take too long to check the local news reports for the dates of those fatalities, which confirmed that many were drunk and/or speeding at the time of the crash. That part didn't make it into the general media feeds. The big media story was the evil corporation snuffing out lives, again. Recalls, recalls, and more recalls. Ugh. My head didn't pull a Louis Del Grande, but I was definitely using more generic ibuprofen than usual. It was time to jump.

That was two years ago, right about the time that I got out of the car, and back into the head space that is now Clean Sweep. This is where I want to be. The only way I'd do the car-think thing again is with Netflix money. Fade in. A dusty deserted airstrip. Michael Clark speaks. "Tonight, on Road Rage. We go head-to-head with the Subaru This and the Honda That. And one of these cars is GOING TO DIE!!! (Cue explosions, roll catchy theme music.)

About Winnipeg. In some ways, I do believe its Canada's best-kept secret, and there's plenty of secrets being kept in Clean Sweep. Like any location on the planet that inhabits humans, Winnipeg has plenty to hide. I hope you enjoy what I found, even if it is pure fiction. 

Keep the shiny side up, and the rubber side down.

MC