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If you paid minimal attention to the YouTube post here a few weeks ago — and an ancient post at Elephino Creative — then you may have noticed a microtrend. If not (why would you?) I’ll spell it out:

Mrs. Novels and I are trying to have a kid.

In a month — almost to the day — I’ll be forty. That means, even though my wife and I have a good feeling about May, I’ll probably see another birthday come rolling around before the as-yet-unmade ankle biter squeezes from the dark and into the light… so make that forty-one.

Geezer dad.

Obviously, we’re having a great time with it all. And it’s only been a few months that we’ve been trying to get her pregnant, so I’m a long way from being one of those strange men who say they felt like a piece of meat after a while, that their wives treated them like little more than a sperm factory.

I told my wife I’m expecting her to punch me in the mouth if I ever get that way.

Of course, waiting for so long to start a family has it’s disadvantages. For starters, our ages put a damper on the process. Teenage girls these days seem to get pregnant just thinking about unprotected sex. Mrs. N and I figure it’ll take us six months to a year.

Also, it turns out I’ve got a pituitary disorder that’s putting the kibosh on my testosterone. Actually, it’s not exactly a disorder.

It’s tumors.

There. I said it.

Tumors.

Okay, technically, I have brain cancer.

But to say that insults people who have Brain Cancer.

No, what I have are two benign masses — each about 2.5 millimeters in diameter — on my pituitary gland. Two-and-a-half millimeters may not sound like a big deal, but considering the gland itself is the size of a pea, the tumors are big enough to seriously mess with my hormones.

For now, my doctor and I are using the “watchful waiting” method of treatment. He takes my blood every couple of months to monitor my testosterone level, which, by the way, is normal… for a sixty-five year old man.

I’m going back for another MRI later this year. My nads doc also takes a sperm count every three or four months. It was seventy million — give or take — last time around. That’s normal for a man my age. And I’m thankful (thrilled!) I didn’t have to count them myself.

The real irony here is that we’re going this route because of Operation Yard Ape. If I started drug therapy (legal anabolic steroids… woo hoo!) it’d raise my testosterone and shrink the tumors.

But it’d also squash my swimmers. Can’t have that. Not right now, anyway.

The good part is that I feel fine. But I do have some manifestations.

I gain weight like it’s nobody’s business.

Back in December of 2006, I’d been holding steady at about two-thirty… a great spot for me. By Memorial Day weekend of 2007, I’d jumped to two forty-five, more or less. By February of this year, I hit two sixty-five.

Makes sense. Part of the thing that testosterone does is regulate body fat.

I’ve since been able to trim my weight down to two fifty-eight or so, provided I watch my sodium. Seems I’m overly sensitive to salty foods these days. Maybe that’s another manifestation. In any case, if it’s salty and I eat it, I’m up about four pounds the next day.

That rules out everything that tastes good.

I can’t exactly stop eating so, for now, I’m not worrying about it so much. Besides, once my old lady gets pregnant, the manabolics get switched back on.

I’m losing muscle mass.

While I wouldn’t call myself a gym rat, I do like lifting heavy things in interesting ways and I do my best to make sure I’m getting to a weight room three or four times a week.

On the plus side, I’m not losing strength… in fact, my strength is holding steady or increasing. But I’m getting a little mushy, especially in my arms and chest.

And belly.

Legs, too.

Speaking of mushy, I get super-emotional during movies.

I’ve always been a bit of a softy. Just ask my wife about what happens to me when I watch the movie FLY AWAY HOME, especially during the part where Anna Paquin flies over the field just in time to save the goose refuge from the evil real estate developer.

Cue the Mary Chapin Carpenter song and forget about it.

Yeah. Just call me “blubbering mess.”

But these days it’s ridiculous. If what’s on screen hints at being even remotely touching, I get a lump in my throat the size of Oklahoma.

It’d bother me if it wasn’t so freaking hilarious.

So there you have it. Too much information.

But there are also advantages.

Advantages to waiting until now to start a family, that is. First among them is that my wife and I have a lot of wisdom these days, way more than we had when we got married a decade ago.

Don’t get me wrong… the wisdom tank’s not full. Not even close. We know there’s no owner’s manual for life in general and child rearing in particular — despite the book store’s teeming evidence to the contrary on all counts.

I was talking to my mom a few weeks back and she said, “You’ll swear to yourself that you won’t make the same mistakes your own parents made. But you will… plus a whole bunch of new ones, too.”

I’m sure she’s right, but whatever. I have to think we’re better equipped now.

And even if we weren’t it wouldn’t matter because Mrs. Novels and I are as excited as, well, we’re pretty damn excited about this new part of our lives.

And it ain’t even happened yet!

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There went I stumbling through the Internet just a little blind. When I opened my eyes I found Short Short Fiction by DBA Lehane.

He uses Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day as a prompt. He plops out 500 words… unedited… first draft goodness (or not-so-goodness by his own admission).

I won’t be stealing the blog idea. I am, however, shamelessly stealing the concept.

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Like Carl Lewis, this one got me from out of the gate. But unlike Lewis, the promise that “The Confession” reeled me in with vanished down the stretch.

This book had it all: successful shrink with a penchant for infidelity, sexy Marin, intriguing (if not fresh) plot, a sleazy prosecutor, an angry wife, and a crooked cop. But where did it go wrong?

Good question. But I want to start with where it went right.

The first thing that stood out to me was the complexity written into the hero’s character. He’s a self-made man from humble beginnings. Yes, I know, lots of cliche right there. But what I liked about this character is that he was well aware of his shortcomings from a perspective we really don’t get in such books. He’s a shrink and early on he lets us know what to expect with him.

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I’m not yet sure what I think of this novel. I got turned on to the author by my mom, who loaned me an earlier work called “Blinded.” My interest, really, is fuelled by proximity. White lives in Boulder, Colo., and his books are set in the quaint college town that lies just 40 miles away from where I live in Denver.

White uses familiar landmarks and references that I sometimes wonder are lost on people who don’t know them. Despite this, I tend to be drawn into his storytelling a little more than books set in other locales.

Compared to “Blinded,” and other psyhological thrillers, I found this latest to be a bit more deliberate. White’s protagonist, Dr. Alan Gregory, finds himself in another pickle where he’s faced with professional dilemmas — balancing patient confidentiality versus perhaps saving the life of some unknown person who could be in danger. The trick, as always, is for Gregory to figure out how keep both promises: the promise to his patient and the social promise to the greater good.

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I was zooming around the Internet the other day and I stumbled across a site called Change This. It’s another creation from marketing expert Seth Godin.

This site, which he launched with Amit Gupta — the wunderkind behind The Daily Jolt — is an attempt to leverage the power of Web 2.0 … maybe not so much to be a vehicle for social change as much as a powerful method of spreading ideas. Not unknown territory for Godin.

So what does this have to do with writing or reading?

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