I generally don’t talk a lot about my personal life on Brad’s Reader because I don’t want to bore you with the mundane details of my life. But there is something I feel the need to share.

There is a big change coming my way. My wife is pregnant with our first child. It’s a boy! The name is being kept under wraps until he’s born – which can be any day now. She is full-term (and very uncomfortable) so we are just playing the waiting game.

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Writers, by nature, are risk takers. We sweat and toil over our writing, with no guarantee of success. There are a lot of writers who will spend a year or more writing a novel that will never get published. It’s the nature of the beast.

I think the risk of failure is the biggest obstacle many budding writers face. I know I struggle with this every time I open up my word processor. But what is more important than taking risks is that if you don’t succeed, you learn from your mistakes and try again.

One of the biggest risk-takers is Sir Richard Branson who started a small company called Virgin Records and eventually expanded it into an airline, mobile phone service and dozens of other businesses. Branson has also risked his life (literally) in other ways, such as attempting to circle the world in a balloon. He’s been plucked from the ocean for several rescues.

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Some of my most vivid and pleasant childhood memories are from the books I read. I can easily remember characters, plot details and even the setting of a lot of books.

I think this has a lot do with the brain being actively engaged in the reading, therefore being “burned” into your memory bank forever. Television, on the other hand, is a passive activity where the use of your own imagination is severely limited.

Music is also a lot like reading. I associate different phases of my life with the music I listened to at the time. For example, my college years are painted with the gritty music of the Grateful Dead.

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I just wanted to post a quick announcement that I will be a guest on the show Conversations LIVE! with Cyrus Webb tonight at 8pm EST. The topic will be ‘The Business of Books.”

Other guests on tonight’s program include authors Zetta Elliot and Christopher Hertz, Todd Rutherford of Yorkshire Publishing and book reviewer Joe Pinkney. This is a great lineup of guests from across the publishing world and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

You can also join the conversation through chat by following this link The Business of Books, or by calling in at 347.426.3645.

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for updates, interesting links and more.

Look closely at the cover of this book that is listed on Amazon.com. Does anything strike you as odd? Yes, the “iStockPhoto” watermark is still on the cover image. This is a good example of why authors and publishers need to pay attention to detail, especially on the front cover! I’d say leaving the watermark on the cover image is a pretty big detail.

Having the watermark still on the cover image means that either A) They didn’t pay for the image, or B) They paid for the image but didn’t swap out the sample image for the paid one – the image without the watermark. Either way, it’s still a book cover fail!

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After my grandmother passed away last December, my mom and her brother and sister have been going through her house to get her belongings sorted out. Among those items was a short story I wrote when I was 12, around the time I was in the 7th grade (about 1992). I sent it to my grandparents and they had apparently filed it away for all these years.

I don’t remember writing this specific short story, but I remember it being an assignment for my creative writing class. We had to read them in front of the class – which was probably the worst part. The only other memory I have of this story is was received pretty well by my classmates and my creative writing teacher.

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Writers can be a lonely bunch, which is why every writer needs a writing buddy. Mine just happens to be my cat, Kirby. This morning she made herself comfortable on my desk, behind my computer – trying to catch a few rays of sunshine coming in through the window.

What you don’t see in this picture is Kirby sniffing at everything on my desk (my writing tools must smell good) and batting at my pens, paperclips and anything else that’s easy for her paws to move. She also has a habit of biting at, and even eating paper, if it’s handy to do so.

Okay, maybe she’s not the perfect writing buddy, but she does keep me company and definitely keeps me amused as I work through the day’s business.

Who is your writing buddy?

Last week I wrote a post Meditate your way to better writing where I talked about how meditation can quiet the mind and give your brain a “rest.” I argued that when the mind is emptied out of all the distractions that life throws at us, it makes room to be more creative and improve your writing.

I’m continuing this theme of healthy ways to better writing (a theme I did not plan ahead of time, it just kinda happened) by talking about exercise and how it can have a positive impact on your creativity and writing. Exercise is obviously one of the most healthy activities one can pursue as it helps keep you in shape and reduces the risk of a lot of diseases.

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I know a lot of my readers on this blog are interested in ebooks, publishing news, self-publishing, writing and so forth. How do you keep up with all these topics without spending all day searching the interwebs. Of course Google is probably the first place you’ll search. But Google has tools that will allow you to stay current on just about any topic without wasting a lot of time.

When I first began Brad’s Reader, my main focus was on literature and writing. Since the world of literature is so big, I needed a way to see all the important bits of news and related blog posts at-a-glance. What did I use? I created a Google Alert using the search term “literary news”.

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I just returned from spending a few days in San Diego on family business (hence my lack of posts this week). While my reason for going there was quite sad, it was nice to get away from the cold Chicago winter and spend some time in the warm California sun and visit with my extended family.

There are a two bits I wanted to share with you regarding my trip, both dealing with ebooks.

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