Over on Facebook, Our Hero's All-Time Greatest Hits, as "liked" by FB friends, include the following . . .

Hurrah! My ship is finally coming in. I've just received a letter from France. A lawyer indicates that a safe deposit box containing $4.2 million will be opened, and half that total will come to me, if I simply follow his instructions. Of course I will comply. Checking in here has been swell, but I'll be managing many new investments now, so you'll find me on FB less often. This just proves that if you work hard and keep to the moral high road, you will, in the end, receive your just reward.

Sheena's Irish show. Saturday, March 9, at Arts on Queen in the Beaches, 1-4 pm. Here's one of my favorites.
Wow! The B.C. poet Lorna Crozier gave the Margaret Laurence lecture. I've heard quite a few of these, and I can tell you: she RAISED THE BAR! Sentence for sentence, I do not believe she has been matched . . . a truly wonderful piece, and I hope she publishes it somewhere before too long. So you don't have to take my word for it.

How much I love newspapers. Saturday morning coffee, peanut butter toast, sifting sections, reordering them. And the range, the serendipity, chancing upon items I would never encounter online. The flipping back and forth, the pace, the cut-this-piece-out-for-my-files. Face it: I'm with newspapers for the duration.

Hurrah! I've just sent the final, edited draft to HarperCollins Canada. Fifty Canadians Who Changed the World. Coming your way in September. Are you with me?
Waterstone's bookstore in Edinburgh. Glorious. And one entire wall -- long wall, floor to ceiling -- is devoted to Scottish books: fiction, biography, history, travel, children's, crime. It really works. We went wrong, in Canada, when we moved away from sections and walls featuring Canadian books. Let's admit it and revert.

If I were a better man, more disciplined, I would adhere to one simple rule: no Internet before lunch. No email, no Facebook, no Twitter, no checking for the latest on Rob Ford. Think of the reading and writing I would get done!

Thrilled to be part of a new, Nova Scotia-based program offering an MFA in Creative Nonfiction.