Last week was pretty much overwhelmed by my day job – lots of late evenings trying to keep all the plates spinning. As a result running and writing both fell by the wayside and that’s going to continue to be the case for the next couple of weeks while we finish off our latest title and get a couple of new projects fired up.

Wednesday was the exception though; we braved the Vancouver rain to see William Gibson at the latest Incite event at the Vancouver Public Library. Okay, so it’s only about four blocks from home so it wasn’t much of a sacrifice, but still…rain.

Incite is a series of literary events organised by the Vancouver International Writers Festival and they’re free, which meant getting there early to make sure we got a decent seat – in this case a prime position in the second row.

Mr Gibson was there to promote his latest book – Distrust That Particular Flavor – a collection of non-fiction essays culled from magazines, websites and speeches. He read a short chapter from the book in between questions from the VIWF Artistic Director, Hal Wake, and the audience. Topics ranged from his reluctance to publish non-fiction to the appeal of Japan to the mysterious origins of the name Hubertus Bigend and they made for a varied and entertaining evening.

Like so many people, I first encountered William Gibson through Neuromancer and I can still remember lying in my bedroom eagerly devouring the Sprawl Trilogy. I still have those books and I’ve been a fan ever since so it was a real pleasure to get to see and listen to him in person. It was odd to hear Hal Wake calling him Bill though.