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.

Mike McCardell has earned the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of fans for his investigative reporting and human-interest stories. He is the author of the bestselling essay collections Unlikely Love Stories, Here’s Mike, Chasing the Story God, Back Alley Reporter, Getting to the Bubble, The Expanded Reilly Method, The Blue Flames that Keep Us Warm, Everything Works and None of This Was Planned, as well as the local history book Haunting Vancouver and the memoir Cardboard Ocean. You can also catch his stories on “The Last Word,” which airs at the end of CTV News at Six on weeknights.

Mike McCardell's profile page