Mike McCardell has spent his life tracking down thousands upon thousands of stories, from the uplifting to the sobering, from the bizarre to the sublime. As the author of many books and a lifelong reporter, he has stored up a vast collection of anecdotes and is never short of a tale to tell.

With None of This Was Planned, McCardell takes us behind the scenes to show the sometimes agonizing, sometimes accidental, always reaffirming experience of hunting down a good story with the clock ticking toward air time.

Between the frantic race to find stories against the odds, the collection covers such topics as the difficulty of counting guinea pigs, Vancouver's own volcano, the cruelty of goldfish shoes, the Six o'Clock Gun and other gems from Vancouver's past, the violent history of the tulip, the impossibility that Mike would ever admit to watching Survivor, Burnaby crow parties and the secret to a perfect chocolate-chip cookie.

As McCardell describes, you don't have to be a professional to collect stories of your own. All you need to do is take a walk and keep your eyes open--or open a good book. So sit back and get ready to add this batch of stories to your own collection.